Now that the new smokegenerator is in trunk and generating smoke on windows shouldn”t be a pain anymore, I thought that I could dig out my nearly unused Vista partition on my laptop and start porting Qyoto to Windows.
First thing I did was removing the preinstalled Vista and installing it again to get rid of all the preinstalled crap Dell thought I needed. Next was installing Visual C++ and C# (the Express editions are free as in beer and work ok – nothing in comparison to KDevelop4 though) and KDE 4.3. Thanks to all of the KDE Windows team – you make Windows much more bearable! I also installed msys – can”t live without a proper shell anymore.
Now came the actual porting: To support MS .NET and not only Mono, I needed to add support for csc.exe (the MS C# compiler) to the existing C# macros. As I recently discovered how to add support for a new language to cmake (which lacks documentation but is really easy once you understood it) I simply rewrote the C# macros as a new cmake language plugin. Compilation was pretty straight-forward, then.
But as was to be expected, the examples simply crashed upon start. Long story short: Some of them work now and this is how it looks:
This is still really unstable and crashes every few minutes with an AccessViolationException. Have to figure out why it does that.. But first I have to do some other things, mainly porting the remaining kalyptus-generated smoke modules to the new smokegenerator. This shouldn”t take too long, so I think I can complete the Windows port soon 🙂 So stay tuned!
Update: The AccessViolationExceptions should be fixed now. If you want to try Qyoto on Windows and have problems getting it to compile or run, please send a mail to the kde-bindings mailinglist and include the complete error and backtrace. You can also search the mailing list archives since this topic came up quite often recently.