PDAL: writing tutorial .exe cannot find PDAL DLLs

Question

I'm following this link: https://pdal.io/development/writing.html#writing My environment is Windows 10 I already have Visual Studio 2019 installed.

1. Install Conda, create environment "pdal", install pdal on that environment.
2. Open Conda terminal window. I did "echo %PATH%" and saw that "...\anaconda3\envs\pdal\Library\bin" is in the PATH.
3. Copy the files tutorial.cpp and CMakeLists.txt from PDAL github
4. Install CMake
5. Run cmake. Visual Studio .sln file was created. No error.
6. Open the .sln using Visual Studio and build the solution. No error. tutorial.exe was created.

Note: steps 3-6 are run inside Conda "pdal" environment.

When I tried to run the tutorial.exe from the command line, I got a debug error. When I tried to run it from VS, using "Start without Debugging", I got all these:

The code execution cannot proceed because ____.dll was not found.

But these .dll files are in the "...\anaconda3\envs\pdal\Library\bin" folder which is in the PATH.

Can anyone point me to what I missed?

Answer 1

The best place to learn about how to build PDAL on Windows is to replicate what PDAL itself uses to build on Windows. Specifically, PDAL's continuous integration scripts at https://github.com/PDAL/PDAL/tree/master/scripts/ci/win provide clear examples of prerequisites to install, how to configure them with cmake, how to build and how to execute the tests.