Building from Source

🛠️ Building from Source & CI/CD

Metadata Editor is written in C# using .NET 8.0 WPF (net8.0-windows) with an MVVM architecture and automated xUnit test suite.

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🧰 Prerequisites

• .NET 8.0 SDK (Windows x64)
• Windows 10 or Windows 11
• (Optional) Visual Studio 2022 (with .NET Desktop Development workload) or VS Code
• (Optional) Inno Setup 6 (for compiling the Windows MetadataEditor-Setup-v<Version>.exe installer)

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🏗️ Project Architecture

MetadataEditor/
├── .github/workflows/
│   └── build-and-release.yml      # CI/CD pipeline for automated builds, tests & GitHub Releases
├── Samples/                       # Sample NFO files (Movie, TV Show, Episode, Album, Scene ASCII)
├── src/
│   ├── MetadataEditor/            # Main WPF Desktop Application
│   │   ├── Models/                # NfoMetadata, ArtworkItem, ActorItem, TrackItem, XmlExtraItem, AppSettings
│   │   ├── Services/              # NfoParserService, FileEncodingDetector, SettingsService, ThemeService, UpdateService
│   │   ├── ViewModels/            # MainViewModel, SettingsViewModel, RelayCommand
│   │   ├── Views/                 # SettingsWindow, Converters
│   │   ├── Styles/                # Theme.xaml (Dynamic Dark/Midnight/Light resource brushes)
│   │   ├── Resources/             # app.ico, app.svg, generate-icon.ps1
│   │   └── MainWindow.xaml        # Main 3-tab shell & sidebar browser
│   └── tests/
│       └── MetadataEditor.Tests/  # xUnit automated test suite
├── build-portable.bat             # Builds framework-dependent portable distribution
├── build-single-file.bat          # Builds self-contained single-file executable
├── installer.iss                  # Inno Setup installer script
└── MetadataEditor.sln             # Solution file

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🚀 Building & Running Tests via CLI

Clone the repository and run the standard .NET CLI commands from the repository root:

# 1. Clone the repository
git clone https://github.com/KevinK56/MetadataEditor.git
cd MetadataEditor

# 2. Restore and build the solution
dotnet build MetadataEditor.sln -c Release

# 3. Run the automated xUnit test suite
dotnet test MetadataEditor.sln -c Release

# 4. Run the application
dotnet run --project src/MetadataEditor/MetadataEditor.csproj

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📦 Producing Release Builds Locally

1. Self-Contained Single-File Executable

Run build-single-file.bat or execute:

dotnet publish src/MetadataEditor/MetadataEditor.csproj `
  -c Release `
  -r win-x64 `
  --self-contained true `
  -p:PublishSingleFile=true `
  -p:IncludeNativeLibrariesForSelfExtract=true `
  -p:EnableCompressionInSingleFile=true `
  -o release/single-file

2. Portable Framework-Dependent Build

Run build-portable.bat or execute:

dotnet publish src/MetadataEditor/MetadataEditor.csproj `
  -c Release `
  -r win-x64 `
  --self-contained false `
  -o release/portable

3. Inno Setup Windows Installer

With Inno Setup 6 installed:

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Inno Setup 6\ISCC.exe" /DMyAppVersion="2026.10.08.1" installer.iss

This outputs release\installer\MetadataEditor-Setup-v2026.10.08.1.exe.

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🤖 Continuous Integration & Automated Releases

Every push to master runs the GitHub Actions workflow .github/workflows/build-and-release.yml:

1. Dynamic Versioning: Calculates the build version from the UTC date and git commit count (YYYY.MM.DD.<CommitCount>).
2. Automated Testing: Runs all unit tests in MetadataEditor.Tests (XML parsing, extra node attribute preservation, encoding detection, settings persistence, update service version comparison).
3. Artifact Compilation: Builds the self-contained single-file MetadataEditor.exe, portable .zip bundle, and Inno Setup installer MetadataEditor-Setup-v<Version>.exe.
4. GitHub Release Publishing: Automatically tags the commit and publishes all three release artifacts so users receive updates directly via the in-app UpdateService.