This section will take you through the steps necessary to build BrightstarDB from source.
Before you can build BrightstarDB you need to install the following tools.
Visual Studio 2012
You can use the Professional or Ultimate editions to build everything.
TBD: Check what can be built with VS 2012 Express
Windows Phone SDK
This is required only to build the mobile solution that targets Windows Phone 7 and 8. Get the Windows Phone SDK from htpp://dev.windowsphone.com/
MSBuild Community Tasks
You must install this from the MSI installer which can be found at http://code.google.com/p/msbuildtasks/downloads/list. The MSI installer will install the MSBuild Community Tasks extension in the right place for it to be found by our build scripts.
OPTIONAL: WiX
WiX is required only if you plan to build the installer packages for BrightstarDB. You can download WiX from http://wixtoolset.org/. The build is currently based on version 3.5 of WiX, but it is recommended to build with the latest version of WiX (3.7 at the time of writing).
The source code for BrightstarDB is kept on GitHub and requires Git to retrieve it. The easiest way to use Git on Windows is to get the GitHub for Windows application from http://windows.github.com/. Alternatively you can download the Git installation package from http://git-scm.com/. If you do not want to install Git and are happy to simply work with a snapshot of the code, the GitHub website offers ZIP file packages of the source tree.
Branches
The BrightstarDB source code is organized into multiple branches. The most important ones are develop and master.
The develop branch is the latest development version of the source code. Most of the time the code on develop should be stable in as much as it compiles and the unit tests all pass. However, occasionally this is not the case.
The master branch only gets updated when a new release is ready, so the head of the master branch will be the source code for the last release.
Branches with the name release/X.X contain the source code for the named release.
Branches with the name feature/XXX contain work in progress and should be regarded as unstable.
Cloning With GitHub For Windows
To retrieve a clone of the Git repository simply go to https://github.com/BrightstarDB/BrightstarDB and on the right-hand side of the page you will see a button labelled “Clone in Desktop”. Click on that button to launch GitHub for Windows and start the process of cloning the repository. Once you have the cloned repository you can then use the GitHub for Windows GUI to select the branch you want to work with.
Cloning With Git
To clone over HTTPS use the repository URL https://github.com/BrightstarDB/BrightstarDB.git To clone over SSH use git@github.com:BrightstarDB/BrightstarDB.git. Note that cloning over SSH requires that you have an SSH key set up with GitHub.
Downloading a source ZIP
You can download the source code on a given branch as a ZIP file if you want to avoid using Git. To do this, go to https://github.com/BrightstarDB/BrightstarDB and select the branch you want to download from the drop-down box. Then use the ‘Download ZIP’ button to retrieve the source.
The core BrightstarDB solution can be found at src\core\BrighstarDB.sln. This solution will build BrightstarDB’s .NET 4 assemblies as well as the BrightstarDB service components including the Windows service wrapper.
The BrightstarDB solution uses a some NuGet packages which are not stored in the Git repository, so the first time you open the solution you will need to restore the missing packages. To do this, right-click on the solution in the Solution Explorer window in Visual Studio and select Manage NuGet Packages for Solution.... In the dialog that opens you should see a message prompting you to restore the missing NuGet packages.
Once the NuGet packages are restored you can build the entire solution either from within Visual Studio or from the command-line using the MSBuild tool.
The core solution’s unit tests are all written using the NUnit framework. The easiest way to run all the unit tests is to use the unit test project file from the command prompt. To do this, open a Visual Studio command prompt and cd to the src\core directory under the BrightstarDB source. Then run the unit tests with:
msbuild unittests.proj
The portable class library solution can be found at src\portable\portable.sln. As with the core solution, the portable class library solution has some NuGet dependencies which need to be downloaded. Follow the same steps outlined above for the core solution to download and install the dependencies before trying to build this solution from the command line.
This solution also requires that you have a Windows 8 developer license installed. You should be prompted by to retrieve and install this license if necessary when you first open the solution file in Visual Studio.
The src\tools directory contains a number of command-line and GUI tools including the Polaris management console. Each subdirectory contains its own Visual Studio solution file. As with the core solution, NuGet packages may need to be restored, so when opening the solution file for the first time right-click on the solution in the Solution Explorer window and select Manage NuGet Packages for Solution... and if necessary follow the prompt to download an install missing NuGet packages.
An MSBuild project is provided to compile and build a complete release package for BrightstarDB. This project can be found at installer\\installers.proj. The project will build all of the libraries and documentation and then make MSI and NuGet packages.
..note:
Building the full installer solution requires all the pre-requisites listed above to be installed. It also requires that you have first restored NuGet dependencies in both the core solution and the tools solution as described in the sections above.