Updated Apr 01, 2007 by andrew.kirillov
Labels:	Featured, Project-About

Tools

The document provides information about tools being used in the project and information about build process

Accessing project sources

To be able to access project sources you will need one of Subversion clients. You may use command line utilities to work with source code repository or you can use one of Subversion GUI and IDE clients. Personally I prefer to use TortoiseSVN client.

When you checked out the project, you should have 2 folders in your file system:

[AForge Home]
  |- Samples
  \- Sources

Working with source codes and building the project

Once you checked out project sources you will need an IDE to work with them, update them and build. You can use any IDE, which supports .NET 2.0 projects. For example Notepad and command line tool could be fine. But, if you don't want to lose a lot of time, I would suggest you to download free C# 2005 Express Edition from Microsoft, which was used for development of the framework.

The first thing to do is to build the AForge.NET libraries, which sources are placed in the Sources folder. When you build libraries successfully, you will get Release folder with all AForge.NET libraries:

[AForge Home]
  |- Release
  |- Samples
  \- Sources

After that, you can go into Samples folder and open and build any of the provided samples. Or you can go to the next step and build project documentation.

Building project documentation

At this moment Sandcastle is used as a tool to build project documentation. It provides you with ability to build nice documentation in the VS.NET 2005 style. But, since Sandcastle provides only command line utilities, it is not so convenient in use. That is why Sandcastle Help File Builder was used as GUI for Sandcastle, which allows to create help file projects and build them. Help file project files are placed in Sources/Docs Projects folder. After you open and build each project one by one, you get complete AForge.NET documentation in the Docs folder:

[AForge Home]
  |- Docs
  |- Release
  |- Samples
  \- Sources

Building installation package

To build installation package Inno Setup installer is used. The setup project can be found in the /Sources/Setup Project folder. To build successfully an installation package the next directory structure should be in the setup project folder:

[Setup Project]
  |- aforge.iss
  |- gpl.txt
  \- Files
      |- Docs
      |- IPLab
      |- Release
      |- Samples
      |- Sources
      |- Copyright.txt
      \- Release notes.txt

Comment by iainsproat, Apr 06, 2008

Building the project with SharpDevelop?: Open the AForge.sln found in the sources folder. Change the build configuration to Release. You can do this by going to the Build menu, selecting Set Configuration, and then choosing Release. Then you can compile it (F5).

I received an error from the Vision project, regarding missing reference to Imaging. This reference was there, but appeared to be broken (as on 6th April 2008). I resolved this by deleting the reference, and then creating a new reference to the Imaging Project. It compiled just fine after changing this.

Comment by iainsproat, Apr 06, 2008

The latest version of Sandcastle is to be found on Codeplex, here. The SandCastle? Help File Builder also requires Microsoft HTML Help File download available at http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms669985.aspx