vcpkg with VS2010/Win7

[nurbles]

I'm getting the dreaded (at least by me) "error: in triplet x64-windows: Unable to find a valid Visual Studio instance" and I don't know how to resolve it, or if it is even possible to resolve. Here's how I got here:

1. Install vcpkg on my Win7/VS2010 system for the very first time ever. That went fine.
2. Try to run vcpkg install libzip --triplet=x86-windows and get the error message above.
3. Notice the x64 in the message, when I specified x86 as the triplet, I tried setting the VCPKG_DEFAULT_TRIPLET and VCPKG_DEFAULT_HOST_TRIPLET environment variables to x86-windows and got a different, very unexpected error: error: Invalid triplet: x86-windows
4. Decided to try running within a Visual Studio Command Prompt by using the item from the VS2010 Tools menu to start a shell.
5. Try to install libzip again and get the same errors under the same conditions.

Visual Studio 2010 is installed with all of the default folders, paths, etc. and has been working just fine for 14 years. Apparently, vcpkg has a different view of how things should be installed and doesn't care about how Microsoft installed the product for me.

Hopefully, this wonderful community can help me force vcpkg to use the actual configuration of Visual studio instead of whatever imaginary configuration it is using.

Of, if there is some VS component that I did not originally install, then the error message is junk, since it should tell me exactly what component was not found so that I might at least have a chance to solve this on my own. If any vcpkg developers are reading this, please take note.

[Neumann-A]

VS2010 is not supported for automatic detection and env setup. You'll need some manual triplet setup to make it work. You probably can simply set VCPKG_CHAINLOAD_TOOLCHAIN file to the value vcpkg normally uses. This dectivates the automatic setup but also means you have to run from a dev cmd with everything already set up

[nurbles]

Thanks, I'll give that a try. I found a set of Visual Studio build packages for libzip (and zlib) here on github, but when I call the zip_open() function in it I get an invalid instruction exception. I'm hoping the vcpkg build will work better, if I can get it to build. Thanks again.

[EDIT] Sadly, I clearly do not understand how to follow your suggestion. I tried using a Visual Studio Command Line (which sets up all of the compiler paths, etc.) and tried setting VCPKG_CHAINLOAD_TOOLCHAIN to the full path to the windows.cmake file (none of the others there seem to fit), then I tried just the file name, then I tried just script/toolchains/windows.cmake, but I get the same "Unable to find" error in all cases.

I also tried with --triplet=x86-windows on the vcpkg command line, with the same result. When I remove the triplet setting, I also get a message that I "appear to be in a Visual Studip prompt targeting x86 windows but installing for x64".

So the fix is not quite as simple as I hoped. Any better, more detailed ideas?