title: Building and using Boost for Windows Visual Studio with a custom ICU
body: <p>I have been trying for a few days to build a project based on UIMA C++ framework (http://uima.apache.org/). I am currently using the version 2.4.0 release candidate 6, which comes with Linux and Windows binaries to have all dependancies easily bundled.</p>
  
  <p>In particular, it comes with binary libraries for ICU (3.6 I believe).</p>
  
  <p>In my project, I am building a C++ UIMA annotator and my code makes use of Boost C++ library v1.51.0.</p>
  
  <p>Everything compiles fine but at runtime, I get Access Violation exceptions when starting to use, let's say operator &lt;&lt;(ostream&amp;, const icu::UnicodeString&amp;). It may be a problem of version incompatibility between Boost and UIMA C++.</p>
  
  <p>So, I'm trying to recompile Boost on my machine, telling it to reuse the ICU that comes along with UIMA C++, but there seems to be a problem with MSVC toolset because I always get messages telling me there is no ICU available when building Boost:</p>
  
  <pre><code>c:\Users\Sylvain\boost_1_51_0&gt;b2 toolset=msvc-10.0 variant=release -sICU_LINK=c:\users\sylvain\apache-uima\uimacpp
  
  Building the Boost C++ Libraries.
  
  
  Performing configuration checks
  
      - 32-bit                   : yes
      - x86                      : yes
      - has_icu builds           : no
  warning: Graph library does not contain MPI-based parallel components.
  note: to enable them, add "using mpi ;" to your user-config.jam
      - iconv (libc)             : no
      - iconv (separate)         : no
      - icu                      : no
      - icu (lib64)              : no
      - gcc visibility           : no
      - long double support      : yes
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Has anyone managed to build Boost with the -sICU_PATH options and MSVC?</p>
  
  <p>Thanks,
  Sylvain</p>