Development Building

Building & Running

This page describes how to build FindRomCover from source and produce release archives.

Prerequisites

Requirement	Notes
Windows 10 or later	The application targets net10.0-windows and WPF
.NET 10.0 SDK	Version pinned by global.json with rollForward: latestMajor
Visual Studio 2022+ or Rider	Optional; the CLI is sufficient
Microsoft Edge WebView2 Runtime	Needed at runtime for the web tabs

Clone and build

git clone https://github.com/purelogiccode/FindRomCover.git
cd FindRomCover
dotnet build CSharp_FindRomCover.sln

A warning-free build is expected: the projects enable Meziantou, Roslynator, and Microsoft.CodeAnalysis analyzers.

Run from source

dotnet run --project FindRomCover

The application starts with the folders from your last session. You can pass startup folders as arguments:

dotnet run --project FindRomCover -- "D:\Covers" "D:\ROMs"

Run tests

dotnet test CSharp_FindRomCover.sln

See Testing for details and the full test layout.

Publish

Release builds are framework-dependent and single-file:

dotnet publish FindRomCover/FindRomCover.csproj -c Release -r win-x64 --self-contained false -p:PublishSingleFile=true
dotnet publish FindRomCover/FindRomCover.csproj -c Release -r win-arm64 --self-contained false -p:PublishSingleFile=true

The output is written under FindRomCover/bin/Release/net10.0-windows/<rid>/publish. Zip the contents as release_<version>_win-<rid>.zip to match the naming used on the Releases page.

Note: Published builds are framework-dependent. Users need the .NET 10.0 Desktop Runtime.

Project settings worth knowing

Setting	Value
Target framework	net10.0-windows
Language version	C# 14
Nullable	Enabled
WPF	Enabled
Assembly/file version	3.2.0 (kept in FindRomCover.csproj)
mame.dat	Copied to the output directory on every build
settings.dat	Never copied to the output directory

Documentation build

The docs site uses MkDocs Material:

pip install -r docs/requirements.txt
mkdocs serve

Open http://127.0.0.1:8000. To produce the static site:

mkdocs build --strict

The output lands in site/ (not committed). See CI/CD for how it is published.

Wiki generation

The GitHub wiki is generated from the same docs/ sources:

pwsh ./scripts/Sync-Wiki.ps1 -OutputPath wiki-out

The script rewrites links for wiki page names and writes _Sidebar.md and _Footer.md.

Common build problems

Problem	Solution
NETSDK1045 / SDK not found	Install the .NET 10 SDK; check global.json
Missing mame.dat at runtime	Rebuild; the file is copied automatically, or copy it manually
Analyzer warnings fail the build	Fix the warnings; do not suppress them without a good reason
WebView2 errors at runtime	Install the WebView2 Runtime

Related pages

• Testing
• CI/CD
• Contributing