Using Docker for Windows to Build C++ Applications

Disclaimer

Microsoft does not push any built containers to a public docker registry as the license requires you to have a valid Visual Studio for your use-case as mentioned in this blog-post:

"Remember that the VS Build Tools are licensed as a supplement to your existing Visual Studio license. Any images built with these tools should be for your personal use or for use in your organization in accordance with your existing Visual Studio and Windows licenses. Please don’t share these images on a public Docker hub.

Requirements

As container support or Windows is still relatively new there are still quite a few bugs around. This setup was successfully tested using:

• Windows 10 1809 or newer
• Docker Desktop CE for Windows 2.2.0.5 with Docker Engine 19.03.8

Build Container

In order to build the container call docker build. As mentioned in the official list of known issues you need to pass -m 2GB to install some Visual Studio workloads correctly:

docker build -t build_tools:latest -m 2GB .

The build recipe exposes a number of different argumentes that can be used to customize the container:

• WINDOWS_IMAGE: Docker image to use as basis. Set this variable if e.g. Windows Server Core should be used.
• WINDOWS_IMAGE_VERSION: When using process isolation the Windows version of host and container need to match. This variable required to set the correct Windows version.
• VISUAL_STUDIO_VERSION: Visual Studio Build Tools version to install. Currently supported are 2015, 2017, 2019 and 2022.

Adding GPU support

As of Windows 10 1809 and Windows Server 2019, it is possible to access the hosts GPU when running the container in process isolation. The GPU is enabled by adding --device class/5B45201D-F2F2-4F3B-85BB-30FF1F953599 to the command-line.

Running examples

The sample enum_adapters contains a simple application which lists all the accessible GPUs. Running the following command from this folder should print the hosts GPU and the D3D WARP driver, omitting the --device parameter should only print the D3D WARP driver:

docker run --isolation=process --device class/5B45201D-F2F2-4F3B-85BB-30FF1F953599 -v %CD%\samples:C:\src -it build_tools:latest powershell "mkdir C:\src\enum_adapters\build; cd C:\src\enum_adapters\build; cmake -G 'Visual Studio 15 2017 Win64' ..; cmake --build . --config Debug; .\Debug\enum_adapters"

References

A good write-up of all the problems that can be encountered when working with docker on Windows is summarized by John Freeman