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gbakeman edited this page Nov 19, 2025 · 24 revisions

Goals

  • MVC design adherence
  • Modularization
  • Separate worker and GUI threads
  • Use DataBinding when possible

IDE Extensions

Useful

  • Stack Trace Explorer 2019/2022 - View stack traces in Visual Studio from the pasted contents of a stack trace.
  • Focus - Save and load your open Visual Studio tabs. Useful for when you need to switch to another branch, and want to stash your progress in the current branch with notes on what you were doing at the time.

Build & Release Procedure

The Assembly version is automatically incremented, as defined in SharedAssemblyInfo.vb. The build number is automatically set as the number of days since January 1 2000, and the revision is the number of seconds since midnight divided by two. Major and minor versions are determined manually.

Procedure

Manual releasing is done after desired branches have been merged into the current Dev branch.

  1. Make a build with the (Pre)Release configuration a. Version information is no longer statically specified. Use msbuild -p:"Configuration=[configuration string];Version=[major.minor version].*" .\WinNUT_V2.sln to build instead.
  2. Confirm the version of the client assembly
  3. Edit the properties of the WinNUT-Setup project:
    • Update Version to the major.minor.build of the built client assembly
    • Let the Product and PackageCode fields be regenerated automatically when prompted
    • Go down the Detected Dependencies list in the Solution Explorer, and Exclude any the .NET assemblies that it decided to include
  4. Commit the Setup project changes (and any other uncommitted changes) in git
  5. Make sure the Setup project is built with the latest modifications
  6. Test an MSI upgrade with the built installer on the developer's system
  7. Uninstall WinNUT, then reinstall the previous version (downloading from GitHub if necessary)
  8. Tag and push the commit with the version in the format vmajor.minor.build.
  9. Compress the contents of the WinNUT Client output, giving the archive file a name including the word NoInstaller.
  10. Generate a new release on GitHub, generate release notes and add other details as necessary.
  11. Upload the archive and the generated Setup.msi file.
  12. After publishing the release, test an update from the previous version of WinNUT on the developer's machine to verify automatic update functionality.

Technologies

Localization

WinNUT uses the Multilingual App Toolkit as a part of the Globalization and localization process for .NET applications. If you're interested in contributing translations, please see Translations.

Resources

UI

Windows Forms is the toolkit from Microsoft for creating UI applications in Windows. There are many design patterns for Windows Forms, but the WinNUT project will try to standardize on an MVC pattern, and likely shift between passive views and supervising controllers as convenient. The goal will be to take advantage of the tools provided by Microsoft.

WinNUT's mascot has a distinct gradient-based design. Combined with the use of Windows Forms, WinNUT will standardize on the Windows XP-era icons included in the Visual Studio 2005 Icon pack.

Resources

Framework

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