This is a reproducible Linux-based Dockerfile for cross compiling with MSVC compiler, Conan, CMake, Ninja and Wix Toolset, usable as base image for Continuous Integration setups.
This requires a zipped package of a real MSVC installation from Windows (currently only supporting MSVC 2022, tested until latest 17.8.5), which isn't freely redistributable, so you have to build it on your own.
The MSVC installation can be performed using a Vagrant box and executing the installation of MSVC Community Edition: a Vagrantfile and a Powershell script to prepare the require packages are included in this repository.
- Dual-Core CPU, with VT-x/AMD-v enabled
- 8 GByte RAM (16 GByte recommended)
- Enough Disk Space for Vagrant and Docker images (50 GByte free recommended)
- Fast internet connection
- Virtualbox (7.x)
- Vagrant (2.x)
- Docker Engine 20+
- winrm
- winrm-elevated
To build the docker image, you need to run the following commands:
# starts the Vagrant box, installs MSVC and the other tools and prepares the zip packages
./download-tools.sh
# Builds the docker images (the Ubuntu 22.04 image with wine and the one including also the tools)
./build-docker-images.sh
The first script will start a Vagrant/Virtualbox Virtual Machine with Windows 10, which will execute an unattended installation of Visual C++ tools, together with CMake, Conan and Wix Toolset. Once the installation is completed, the required files will be compressed in ZIP archives and put on the host machine.
The second script will launch in background a python server on port 20000, self-hosting the ZIP archives and then build 2 docker images:
- docker-wine, with only wine-stable (9.0 at time of writing), .NET 4.8 and initialized as Windows 10
- docker-wine-msvc, with the required Visual C++ tools and libraries (cl, link, nmake, rc), the latest Windows 10 SDK, CMake, Conan, Ninja and Wix.
After building the final docker image, the working directory in the docker image is set to /home/wine/.wine/drive_c/ and in the /home/wine/.wine/drive_c/Tools folder are stored all the required tools, plus a batch file that can set the 64 bit environment, in the specific:
- /home/wine/.wine/drive_c/x64.bat
It contains all the required Windows paths in Windows-style format (as 'C:..').
The entrypoint of the Docker Image is set to be a wine64-entrypoint bash script that loads the 64bit Windows CMD console that waits for commands.
To start the image and execute a prepared Windows command or script, you have to call it with double-double quotes as follows:
docker run --rm -it -v HOST_PATH_TO_MOUNT:TARGET_PATH madduci/docker-wine-msvc:17.8-2022 ""YOUR_SCRIPT_IN_TARGET_PATH""
docker run --rm -it madduci/docker-wine-msvc:17.8-2022 ""conan install --requires=openssl/3.2.0""
alternatively, to issue interactive commands:
docker run --rm -it -v HOST_PATH_TO_MOUNT:TARGET_PATH madduci/docker-wine-msvc:17.8-2022
C:>cl /?
C:>conan --version
C:>cmake --version
There are small issues when dealing with Windows-1252 encoding, that are unfortunately wine issues. For example, it has been observed that file names with bad encoding cannot be handled in the Windows CMD.
It has been noticed that on some code, the 32 Bit compiler triggers internal compiler errors (like C1001), especially when dealing with some Windows-specific header file, such as ATL/MFC related code. The 32 Bit compiler is therefore not enabled. On a 64 Bit build, those problems don't appear and the build works fine. It seems that some compiler flags are also affecting those 32 Bit builds.
The Visual Studio CMake generator doesn't work, due to issues with MSBuild and wine. CMake can be used only with NMake Makefiles or, if you prefer, with Ninja, already included in the image. See the test project contained in this repository.
In order to work under Wine/CMD, CMake requires the environment variable MSVC_REDIST_DIR and that must be transformed in Unix Path format.
set(MSVC_REDIST_DIR $ENV{VCToolsRedistDir})
string(REPLACE "\\" "/" MSVC_REDIST_DIR "${MSVC_REDIST_DIR}")
Conan v2 by default tries to use Visual Studio as generator when used with CMake, but you can override it by using the extra configuration parameter -c tools.cmake.cmaketoolchain:generator=Ninja.
The extended image comes also with Ninja, so you can speed up your builds by setting "Ninja" as generator, instead of "NMake MakeFiles". This is the default choice, as the default profile is configured with the CMake Generator set to "Ninja" in the x64.bat script.
Wix by default attempts to validate the generated MSI setup files and it can return the error LIGHT216.
In case you have an incomplete setup (as in the test folder) or have issues with your Wix/MSI settings, you can pass the -sval flag to Wix light command in your CPack configuration:
# LIGHT216 error while building MSI package under wine
set(CPACK_WIX_LIGHT_EXTRA_FLAGS -sval )