Visual Studio 2015 Support

[djewsbury]

Currently XLE is not compiling on Visual Studio 2015. There are a few issues, mostly related to the following points:

• VS2015 is more compliant to the standard for generating implicit copy constructors/operators (where VS2013 was more lenient).
  • in VS2015, if any of the copy/move operators are explicitly defined, then the implicitly generated operators will be marked "= delete". This is the correct standard behaviour. But in these cases, VS2013 will generate them (possibly because the "= default" mark wasn't implemented).
  • we predicted this problem, and tried to explicitly mark operators as "= delete" to prevent VS2013 from generating them
  • but some cases slipped through...
  • Unfortunately the compiler errors related to these problems are difficult to read
• VS2015 adds extra warnings
  • the new warnings will have to be disabled for now (because we compile with warnings as errors)
• VS2015 deprecates some functions/headers (like hash_map), some of which are used by foreign libraries
• some changes to managed compiler behaviour
• some foreign libraries are compiled for VS2013
• there are some other cases were code at the very edge of the standard needs to be adjusted

However, working with VS2015 would be useful, because the VS2013 community edition is no longer available (!!). Plus, in some cases fixing these problems could improve overall performance or robustness.

[djewsbury]

Everything should compile on VS2015 in the "wip" branch now. Win32 builds should work fine. But there is a crash bug in x64 builds currently. Also, some .net control do not "dock" correctly in their parent controls. There appears to be a change in the .net libraries that had affected the docking behaviour.

[djewsbury]

VS2015 support has been pushed into the master branch. Closing this now. To compile on VS2015, use the automatic "retarget" feature in VS to upgrade to toolchain v140.

If you are also using Windows 10, you need to install the DirectX debugging layer for Windows 10 (see the Getting Started Compiling wiki page for more information).

If you have any problems, open an issue (or comment in this issue), send an email to us.

There are still some problems where controls do not dock correctly. This appears to be related to some change in the .net libraries.

Currently the new VS2015 warning are disabled. In the future we might enable them, because they may be helpful in highlight coding errors.