Building Shoes With the Windows DDK

Using the Windows DDK to build Shoes is a wonderful, free alternative to using Visual Studio. The Windows DDK is a development kit for building software drivers, so it doesn't contain all of the bulky IDE and its tools. Still, it contains a platform SDK up to Windows 2003. Since we're building for Windows XP and up, this works great!

So, here are the steps:

  1. Download the 2003 DDK (it's an ISO).
  2. Burn the ISO to CD (or mount the ISO as a drive, or extract it) and run setup.exe
  3. When you get to the screen in the installer that has all the checkboxes, you only need to check "Build Environments". In fact, you can just cut it down to just the first two checkboxes and the Windows XP checkboxes.
  4. Install git. (See InstallingGit.)
  5. Install Ruby (the Windows one-click).
  6. Update rake: gem install rake
  7. Check out Shoes: 
    $ git clone git://github.com/why/shoes.git
  8. Download the win32 dependencies: http://code.whytheluckystiff.net/deps/deps-win32-1.4.10-1.18.0.zip
  9. Unzip the above download, moving the deps folder into your shoes checked out directory. (Leaving you with a shoes/deps folder.)
  10. Open the Windows XP x86 build environment: Start Menu -> Development Kits -> DDK -> Build Environments -> Windows XP -> Windows XP Free Build Environment
  11. In that window, cd to your Shoes checkout directory and run: rake