# Advanced Windows Installation

This document describes the requirements and instructions to build ImageMagick for Windows on your own machine.

## Requirements

- Visual Studio 2013 (or newer)
- Git for Windows
- AMD APP SDK (optional for OpenCL support)

## Install Visual Studio dependencies

To build ImageMagick with Visual Studio the following components should be installed:

- Desktop development with C++ (workload)
- Visual C++ ATL for x86 and x64
- Visual C++ MFC for x86 and x64

Naming of these components might differ between version of Visual Studio. The example above use the Visual Studio 2017 names.

## Clone the dependencies

The ImageMagick library is build with a number of third party libraries. Run `CloneRepositories.cmd` to clone these libraries and the ImageMagick library.

## Build configure.exe

One of the folders that was created in the previous step is called `VisualMagick` and this folder contains a folder called `configure`. This folder contains a solution `configure.sln`. Open this solution with Visual Studio and start a Release build of the project. This will create a file called `configure.exe` in the folder. Running this program will start a Wizard that allows configuration of ImageMagick and its individual components.

## Build ImageMagick

Depending on which options where chosen when running `configure.exe` one of the following solutions will be created in the `VisualMagick` folder:

- VisualDynamicMT.sln (Dynamic Multi-threaded DLL runtimes)
- VisualStaticMTD.sln (Static Multi-threaded DLL runtimes)
- VisualStaticMT.sln (Static Multi-threaded runtimes)

Open the solution to start building ImageMagick. The binaries will be created in the VisualMagick\bin folder.