I am experimenting with libvirt, and my favorite IDE is visual studio so I looked for an easy method to build the libvirt library on windows and found that the state of cross-platform libraries like Mingw are outdated or difficult to use correctly for developers who want to start coding immediatly with libvirt. I know there is a way, but assembling the right libraries and commands was just too much. So, I found that the libvirt dll’s are actually a part of most distros of linux and can be downloaded and extracted. I just needed to find out what dlls were needed, then search the repos for those files.

After the search, I have begun work on a powershell script to get the latest libvirt builds from fedora, download and extract them. After that, you can go to town building libraries against the libvirt api. Check out the script here: https://github.com/smasherprog/Libvirt_Windows_Dll

Anyone who links against the libvirt library would be creating a management tool of some sort so a language like C# so after I create this tool, I will write some code to generate the C# code files for the DLLImport calls. The Libvirt header thousands of lines long so I will write some code to extract the calls/structs and generate the PInvoke calls for everything at once and place it into a .cs file so developers can start dewveloping in libvirt fast and easy.

Scott Lee