Use CMake to build Visual Studio C++ projects with PDAL on Windows

The tutorial on the PDAL website https://pdal.io/development/writing.html provides the details on developing and compiling a simple C++ program using the PDAL API on *nux. I followed the steps but encountered errors trying to compile the example on Windows 10. The following screenshot shows the compilation errors - the Microsoft Visual Studio linker could not find some external symbols such as __imp_htonl_ among others.


 
To fix the compilation errors, the Windows library ws2_32.lib needs to be linked to the final executable. This can be done in the following steps:

1. Add the library ws2_32 to the CMakeLists.txt file, as shown below.
   
   
2. Run CMake to build the Visual Studio project files.
   
   C:\> cmake -G"Visual Studio 15 2017 Win64" ..
   
   
   The project files are generated.
   
   
3. Open up the solution project in Visual Studio. Then build the solution.
   
   The project is successfully built and the executable is generated.