So today I needed to decide what Visual Studio to use for my project. So far I used, at least at home, VS 2010. It works well, but it is quite old by now. At work I use 2015 and I do like it, although I used it for C# rather then C++. So I decide, what the heck, I will use Visual Studio 2015 Community! It is a free edition of Visual Studio and, after looking at its features list, I am sure it got everything I need for my project.

Only think that I forgot about that Visual Studio 2015 is using new standard of C++, I think its compiler like gazillion version newer then 2010 and it got a lot of new project management features. I setup my new solution, added Spark and Irrlicht project to its and... got tons of errors and warnings. I had to spend a couple of hours just going through them and sorting them out. There a lot of stuff that VS 2015 does not like anymore! And there a lot of warning it treats as error! I was kind of prepared for it, as converting projects to newer version of VS usually needed a lot of ironing.

After I fixed all errors and some warnings (who cares about warnings! right? right?!) I run my project and it simply did nothing. What I was excepting is a window opening with simple Irrlicht scene set up inside of it, but I got nothing! Nothing! The application was running but there was no window and it never reached main(). How? What? After a lot of debugging and trying to work out what is going on I found the problem. It was Static Singleton that is used a lot in the Spark. All the static staff was compiled and all Static Singleton instantiated and for some reason in some of them, inside of its own constructor, it was referencing itself. It worked fine in VS 2010, but in 2015 it kinds of stuck in loop. It was not stack overflow! I am not sure what it was! But moving all Ref() from constructors into its classes' Init() functions and everything worked fine. Problem solved!

Now I have a running project, it is blank but it is working. But before I move ahead with all fun stuff, I want to re-setup some of the Spark's libraries in VS 2015. Also I want to grab new Irrlich version and see if they got a project for VS 2015. Just to keep everything updated.

So here where I am today. Next update coming soon! Hopefully!