Q:

What's the quickest and easiest way of getting libpng available for development in VisualStudio2008?

I have some C++ code which uses boost's GIL image library, and wants to write files using boost::gil::png_write_view from boost/gil/extension/io/png_io.hpp.  That header itself  includes png.h, and of course results on a link dependency. 
On Debian it compiles and links fine.  If it did complain about anything missing, the necessary headers and libs would be a few seconds away via an aptitude install libpng-dev.
On Windows (VisualStudio 2008 on XP64), I'm having to face the idea that it looks like I'll have to build libpng from source (and so also its zlib dependency) myself.  If there's an obvious packaging already out there, I'm not seeing it.  Can anyone enlighten me if there is such a useful resource anywhere ?

A:

Libpng's own packaging itself seems to supply project files for vc6 and VC7.1 (VS2003).  And more recent releases also come with VC10 project files.  But nothing for VC8(VS2005) or  VC9(VS2008).  However there are instructions here (which I've yet to try) which describe building for 2008 after running the 7.1 project files through the conversion wizard.
I did initally try the GnuWin32 build of libpng, but (apart from being 32 bit only) it crashed in a libpng call to fwrite when passed a FILE* from VS2008's CRT.  libpng's own documentation has something to say about this and the perils of mixing different versions of MSVC but their suggested workround is only relevant to direct libpng users (and I'm using it via boost GIL).
Update: the converted project files do work pretty well (maybe some minor obvious fixups).  By far the biggest part of the job was creating the 64bit builds; the original and converted project files don't include any such configuration and while visual studio will have a go at creating them, there was a fair amount of config dialog editing to get consistent folder/file names etc.

