MSBuild (Visual Studio)

If you are using CMake to generate your Visual Studio projects, this is not the right section, go to CMake instead. This section is about native integration with Microsoft MSBuild, using properties files.

Conan can be integrated with MSBuild natively, the build system of Visual Studio in different ways:

Using the conan.tools.microsoft tools: MSBuildDeps, MSBuildToolchain and MSBuild helpers to generate properties files for your project, containing information about the project dependencies and toolchain. This is the new integration that is experimental but will become the standard one in Conan 2.0. Go to conan.tools.microsoft for more information.
Using the visual_studio or visual_studio_multi generators to create a MSBuild properties conanbuildinfo.props file. This is the older integration, it is more stable now, but it wil be deprecated and removed in Conan 2.0. Keep reading this page for more information.

With visual_studio generator

Use the visual_studio generator, or visual_studio_multi, if you are maintaining your Visual Studio projects, and want to use Conan to to tell Visual Studio how to find your third-party dependencies.

You can use the visual_studio generator to manage your requirements via your Visual Studio project.

This generator creates a Visual Studio project properties file, with all the include paths, lib paths, libs, flags etc., that can be imported in your project.

Open conanfile.txt and change (or add) the visual_studio generator:

[requires]
poco/1.9.4

[generators]
visual_studio

Install the requirements:

$ conan install .

Go to your Visual Studio project, and open the Property Manager (usually in View -> Other Windows -> Property Manager).

Click the + icon and select the generated conanbuildinfo.props file:

Build your project as usual.

Note

Remember to set your project’s architecture and build type accordingly, explicitly or implicitly, when issuing the conan install command. If these values don’t match, your build will probably fail.

e.g. Release/x64

Build an existing Visual Studio project

You can build an existing Visual Studio from your build() method using the MSBuild() build helper.

from conans import ConanFile, MSBuild

class ExampleConan(ConanFile):
    ...

    def build(self):
        msbuild = MSBuild(self)
        msbuild.build("MyProject.sln")

Toolsets

You can use the sub-setting toolset of the Visual Studio compiler to specify a custom toolset. It will be automatically applied when using the CMake() and MSBuild() build helpers. The toolset can also be specified manually in these build helpers with the toolset parameter.

By default, Conan will not generate a new binary package if the specified compiler.toolset matches an already generated package for the corresponding compiler.version. Check the package_id() reference to learn more.