Day 1

Alright, so I had VS2008 installed, and boost_1_38 as well, since last time that I successfully compiled shareaza. It had been a while, but I figured in 2 hrs I could compile the thing. WRONG!

I spent the two hours trying to resolve:
Error 1 error PRJ0019: A tool returned an error code from "Performing registration" 7ZipBuilder

And I gave up on this error as a seemingly miniscule inconvenience. Though I ended up browsing through ALL of the documentation on property sheets, and googling anything. It turns out that this is a PostBuild event labeled "Performing registration", which fails. When I looked at the code it was two statements. One was a copy command, the second was a regsvr command. I assumed that regsvr did not fail and that the directory that the copy was attempting to copy to was the culprit. I tested this hypothesis in a cmd prompt and I was proven right.

Fixing it however was a nightmare. I could have gone through all of the shareaza projects, and I did have a feeling that this would be the easiest way, instead of figuring out how to use property sheets, and added my local directory name in all of the PostBuild events, but my insatiable urge to generalize drove me away, and eventually to frustration and not accomplishing anything.

So I finally figured out HOW to add a custom environment variable in VS2008, and the funny thing is that they are not called environment variables, but custom user macros. There is an editor in VS2008 designed for this purpose, b/c I was initially going about doing this manually and attempting to create a .vsprops XML file from the schema (yeah I know, how the fuck could I complicate something so simple you ask? that's what I do best), but I could not figure it out completely. So the way to get to this magic dialog box is: View->Property Manager; Rt-click any property sheet -> Properties -> User Macros! Wow that's hard to get to.

So my solution was to create a directory to the main build (exe's location) directory (I'm almost sure this has to have been done by others), as a custom user macro. Then I went through and tried the substitution on one project, but alas the same error ensued. So this is when I gave up, and went to be social for the night.