GDAL ESRI shapefile driver, for ms windows?

[hwstock]

Do you know where I might find this driver (from title)?  There is a GDAL page for drv_shapefile, and maybe even find c++ source, but I was hoping not to build the entire package from scratch.

I decided to try gdal_contour, but apparently need the shapefile drive... the package for Windows doesn't seem to have anything but exe files, and I really can't tell if the drivers are embedded in one of those.  I don't even know what extension I'm looking for. I just spent about an hour cruising the web for a pre-made version of the driver package for windows.

[nm_map_user]

gdal file drivers are not drivers in the same sense as windows device drivers. They are pieces of code that know how to understand a specific file format. If you've downloaded the full pre-built gdal package, it's in there buried in a dll. Just try running gdal_contour. If you're still having problems, give us the error messages.

[hwstock]

I figured that out -- looked at the source, and realized that they were complied into the executable.  I just got a newer distribution, and made a map directly via gdal_contour, by creating shapefiles for the major and minor contours.  The result is interesting -- I'll compare this new map with that made by dem2topo.  I've just started exploring gdal_demo, so I don't know which options exist to smooth the contours, etc.

A bad thing about gdal_contour: it leaves blocky angular lines at the finest scale (no smoothing for contours, so it seems -- so far).  The good thing: you can directly handle much larger maps than you could by dem2topo -- a 10812x10812 geotiff, for example.