Conan Extension for Visual Studio

The Conan Extension for Visual Studio automates the use of Conan, the C/C++ package manager, into your Visual Studio projects. This extension is currently under development, but it already offers the most common functionalities for a C++ project workflow.

Conan

Conan is an open source package manager, with MIT license, focused in C and C++ programming languages. It simplifies the process of integrating and reusing C and C++ libraries from sources and from binaries too, giving your team the ability to boost your development speed.

Conan is a decentralized package manager with a client-server architecture. This means that clients can fetch packages from, as well as upload packages to, different servers/remotes, in a very similar way to the Git push/pull model.

Visit the documentation to get a complete overview of all the features and how to use Conan at all its power.

Conan Extension for Visual Studio

This extension is able to detect a conanfile.txt or conanfile.py added to your solution, and then it will download all the project dependencies building them if neccessary. The resulting path and flags will be added to a .props file and included in your solution, so they will be available for you to use directly from your sources.

Getting started with a basic project should be quite straightforward. Once the extension is installed check the options of the Conan Extension to be sure that the path to the Conan executable is available (install Conan).

Then you can use the menu to trigger Conan or it will fire automatically when a change is detected.

The next image shows a typical layout of Visual Studio with the extension working:

• the conanfile.txt is added to the solution, it declares the dependencies,
• the sources make use of the headers provided by the required library,
• the output window shows the step performed by Conan: it has computed the graph of dependencies, downloaded the recipes and built from sources (binaries were not available in the default remote).

There is a lot of work ahead, we expect to keep adding functionalities to this plugin; and, if you come across any issue or you just want to provide feedback, please write in our repository.

Requirements

Visual Studio 2017 and above