C++ GLFW Development Workspace for Visual Studio Code

This repository is a VS Code workspace template for a simple C++ application that uses the GLFW library. For anyone preferring a lightweight project structure/format to develop C++ OpenGL graphics/games applications using the GLFW library (under Windows OS), this VS Code workspace is a basic starting point. The workspace and configuration can be extended and modified in any way required for practical projects and applications.

Prerequisites

• It's assumed you already have an installed instance of VS Code up and running
• You have MinGW installed in your machine
• The 'Windows pre-compiled binaries' are downloaded from the GLFW downloads page (The file I downloaded was glfw-3.2.1.bin.WIN32.zip. Yours may be different depending on newer releases of GLFW)
• Extracting the file downloaded from above step, the GLFW folder found inside the include folder should be copied to 'MinGW\include' in your local machine (i.e. in my case I copied the contents of glfw-3.2.1.bin.WIN32\include into C:\MinGW\include)
• Similarly, the libglfw3.a and libglfw3dll.a files inside the lib-mingw folder should be copied into the 'MinGW\lib' folder in your local machine (in my case, copying glfw-3.2.1.bin.WIN32\lib-mingw contents into C:\MinGW\lib)

Using the VS Code Workspace

• Clone the repository or download the repository contents to your local machine
• Open the workspace (the folder which contains the .vscode folder) in VS Code
• Click on View -> Integrated Terminal to open up the integrated terminal
• Click on Tasks -> Run Tasks, and you should be prompted with a task named 'Build Application Task'. This is a task specified in the tasks.json file that runs a simple batch file (build.bat) which does the compiling and linking steps, and runs the generated executable binary (app.exe).
• Run the task 'Build Application Task'. You should see some output in the integrated terminal, and the application should execute presenting a window created by GLFW.
• (Optional) Click on File -> Preferences -> Keyboard Shorcuts and add a custom shortcut to running the task