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Quick Start - Windows and Visual Studio

This guide will help you install and build your first PcapPlusPlus application on Windows using Visual Studio in a few simple steps.

Table of contents

  1. Step 1 - install PcapPlusPlus
  2. Step 2 - create your first app
  3. Step 3 - configure your solution
  4. Step 4 - build and run your app

Step 1 - install PcapPlusPlus

Before installing PcapPlusPlus make sure you have the prerequisites installed for Visual Studio. Please notice that the currently supported versions of Visual Studio are 2015, 2017 and 2019.

Download the pre-compiled package for the Visual Studio version you have (VS2015, VS2017 or VS2019) from the v21.05 release page.

Step 2 - create your first app

Go to: Drive:\path\to\your\package\ExampleProject.

You can find the following files there:

 |-- main.cpp
 |-- 1_packet.pcap
 |-- ExampleProject.sln
 |-- ExampleProject.vcxproj
 |-- ExampleProject.vcxproj.filters
 |-- PcapPlusPlusPropertySheet.props

main.cpp is the example application we’ll use.

1_packet.pcap is a pcap file the app reads from.

ExampleProject.sln, ExampleProject.vcxproj, ExampleProject.vcxproj.filters are the Visual Studio solution/project files.

PcapPlusPlusPropertySheet.props is the PcapPlusPlus properties file.

Step 3 - configure your solution

Edit the PcapPlusPlusPropertySheet.props file in the following way:

  • Set the value of the PcapPlusPlusHome XML node to the folder where PcapPlusPlus binaries package is located (the one you downloaded)
  • Set the value of the PcapSdkHome XML node to the folder where WinPcap Developer’s Pack / Npcap SDK is located
  • Set the value of the PThreadWin32Home node to the folder where pthread-win32 is located

Step 4 - build and run your app

You can now open ExampleProject.sln in Visual Studio and build it in the various available configurations (x86/x64 and debug/release).

The .exe file will be created under ExampleProject\Debug\x86 or ExampleProject\Debug\x64 or ExampleProject\Release\x86 or ExampleProject\Release\x64 (according to the chosen configuration). You can now run it and should be able to see the following output:

Source IP is '10.0.0.138'; Dest IP is '10.0.0.1'