You need to have the environment variables set for the Visual Studio toolchain. Visual Studio includes a batch file to set these for you, and installs a Start menu shortcut that opens a command prompt with these variables set.

You need to set MYSQL_DIR to the MySQL server installation path, while using the short-style file names. For example:

C:\> set MYSQL_DIR=C:\PROGRA~1\MySQL\MYSQLS~1.0

Build Connector/ODBC using the "cmake" command-line tool by executing the following from the source root directory (in a command prompt window):

C:\> cmake -G "Visual Studio 8 2005"

This produces a project file that you can open with Visual Studio, or build from the command line with either of the following commands:

C:\> devenv.com MySQL_Connector_ODBC.sln /build Release
C:\> devenv.com MySQL_Connector_ODBC.sln /build RelWithDebInfo

To compile the "Debug" build, set the cmake build type so that the correct versions of the MySQL client libraries are used:

C:\> cmake -G "Visual Studio 8 2005" -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug
C:\> devenv.com MySQL_Connector_ODBC.sln /build Debug

Upon completion, the executables are in the bin/ and lib/ subdirectories.

See Section 20.1.3.1.2, “Installing the Windows Connector/ODBC Driver using the Zipped DLL package” to complete the installation.

Connector/ODBC source distributions include Makefiles that require the nmake or other make utility. In the distribution, you can find Makefile for building the release version and Makefile_debug for building debugging versions of the driver libraries and DLLs.

To build the driver, use this procedure:

After the driver libraries are copied/installed to the system directory, you can test whether the libraries are properly built by using the samples provided in the samples subdirectory:

C:\> cd samples
C:\> nmake -f Makefile all