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Setup of the development environment

Nicolas Lucien (lucien-rowan) edited this page Aug 20, 2024 · 3 revisions

In order to be able to contribute to InstallFreak, you first need to set up your computer for the development of the program. This is a guide on how to set up the InstallFreak dev environment.

Prerequisites

Category Minimum Recommended Used by Nicolas¹
OS Windows 10 1607 x64 Windows 10 22H2 x64 Windows 10 22H2 x64
CPU Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 or AMD Athlon 64 X2 4600+ Intel Core i5-4570 or AMD Ryzen 3 2200GE Intel Core i5-6500
RAM³ 4 GB DDR2 8 GB DDR3 8 GB DDR4
Graphics card Anything supporting DirectX 9 Anything supporting DirectX 12 Intel HD Graphics 530
Available space⁴ 4 GB on an HDD 6 GB on an SSD SSD for everything

¹ These are the specs used by Nicolas as of 20th August, 2024. As the future will haunt us at some point, this is just a current orientation on what you could go with.

³ 8 GB DDR3 RAM are recommended. VS Code can be crashy on 4 GB.

⁴ The required space depends on the application you want to test InstallFreak with.

Downloading software

  • If you haven't already done so, get Git and install it.
  • Get Visual Studio Code and install it.
  • Get the latest version of .NET 8² and install it.

Actually preparing the dev environment

  • Open the terminal and navigate to the directory you want to store the code in.
  • Type in git clone https://github.com/Tech-FZ/InstallFreak.git. Please note that you should fork it and paste in the link to your fork instead.
  • Open it with Visual Studio Code.
  • Download the C# Dev Kit extension.
  • Download the Avalonia Extension.
  • Recommended: Read the source code and understand its purpose. If your antivirus interferes, you want to make sure you can trust it.
  • Compile and test the program to see if it works.⁵

² This is the currently preferred version of .NET for InstallFreak. Subject to change as Microsoft develops it further.

⁵ Your antivirus may interfere in some way. This is why the recommendation to read and understand the source code exists.

What you might want to do

You can finally do it! Please look up some issues (or create one if you have something to add) and get to work on your fork. Then start a pull request.

Trademarks mentioned on this page

  • Windows, Visual Studio Code and .NET are (registered) trademarks of Microsoft Corporation.
  • Intel Core is a (registered) trademark of Intel Corporation.
  • AMD Athlon and Ryzen are (registered) trademarks of Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.
  • InstallFreak © 2024 Nicolas Lucien and InstallFreak contributors