Recommendations for compiling with Microsoft Visual Studio 2005.

Microsoft Visual Studio projects are available for Microsoft Visual
Studio 2005. 

The advantages of building directly in Visual Studio are:
- Build is faster.
- Integrated debugging.
- Library projects can be included as dependencies of your own projects.

The disadvantages of building directly in Visual Studio are:
- Not all parts of the SRILM build process can be completed inside Visual Studio.
- More cumbersome to build from command line.

The build procedure has been tested with the Visual Studio 2005
Professional.

0) Open SRILM/visual_studio/vs2005/srilm.sln in Visual Studio 2005.

1) Select either the "Release" or "Debug" targets.

2) Build the solution.  The libraries will be built into
   SRILM/lib/Release or SRILM/lib/Debug, and the executables will be built
   into SRILM/bin/Release or SRILM/bin/Debug.

This procedure will NOT produce the central include directory, release
the SRILM scripts, or build the test environment.

To produce the central include directory or release the SRILM scripts,
you will have install the cygwin environment and use the included
Makefiles as described in (3):

(3) Follow steps (0) and (1) from README.windows-msvc:

(3a) Install the cygwin environment, as described in README.windows-cygwin.
   Cygwin tools are needed to run the build process and generate program
   dependencies.

(3b) SRILM can be set to the cygwin path of the SRILM root directory
   (e.g., /home/username/srilm, /cygdrive/c/SRILM)

(3c) To produce the central include directory and release the SRILM
   scripts, do either:

   % make MACHINE_TYPE=msvc dirs
   % make MACHINE_TYPE=msvc init
   % make MACHINE_TYPE=msvc release-headers
   % make MACHINE_TYPE=msvc release-scripts
   % cd utils/src; make MACHINE_TYPE=msvc release

or 

   % make MACHINE_TYPE=msvc msvc

If you want to run the SRILM tests, you will have to follow the full
instructions in README.windows-msvc.

If you want to compile using a different version of MSVC, I suggest
creating a new subdirectory of SRILM/visual_studio, e.g.,
"SRILM/visual_studio/vs2010", and copying the contents of the "vs2005"
directory into your new directory.  Then use MSVC to update your
projects.  If you need to downgrade to MSVC 2003, it is possible to do
this by manually editing the project files.

I would like to thank Keith Vertanen (http://www.keithv.com) for
contributing the original versions of these Microsoft Visual Studio
projects to SRILM.

Victor Abrash
victor@speech.sri.com