I thought for a bit of a lark I would compile Mozilla using Visual C++ 7 with the /clr argument to test the magic of IJW. This was not entirely successful. Right now I’m still at stage 0 - building mozilla without the /clr switch, it’s 2:53 AM and staring at the following error messages in config.log (the make file is trying to complie “hello world” to check that my C++ compiler is working properly):
configure(2640) : error C2065: ‘cout’ : undeclared identifier
configure(2640) : error C2065: ‘endl’ : undeclared identifier
It looks like I’m just not cut out to be a C++ programmer (managed or otherwise). I found the following items helpful in my (thus far) fruitless quest.
http://www.mozilla.org/build/win32.html
http://www.squarefree.com/archives/000022.html
The ultimate .plan was to maybe by stroke of luck if the stars were right and the gods were smiling think about possibly exploring the small sliver of hope that maybe in the future if I was really really lucky I could export some of the types in mozilla as managed classes and call them from other managed code (C#/VB.NET winforms maybe…). Reading about some of the things you need to do to get managed and unmanaged types to play together (especially considering the size of the mozilla code base and my amount of C++ experience) meant I was pretty resigned to this not working anyway. Still - I would have liked to see the magic of IJW first hand. Maybe if I want a ‘zilla I can imbed in winforms I should just stick to the Mozilla ActiveX Control.