Noda Time is mostly developed on Visual Studio 2010 and Visual Studio 2012. All versions of Visual Studio 2010 and 2012 which support C#, including Express editions, should be able to build Noda Time. If you're using Visual Studio Express, you may have problems building the PCL version; it depends on other aspects of your computer. Visual Studio Express itself doesn't have full support for portable class libraries, so while it's important to us that developers with only Visual Studio Express can work on the desktop build, we make no guarantees about the PCL build. (Please contact the mailing list if you have problems not covered here.)
You'll also need the .NET Framework SDK. This library supports versions 3.5, 4 and 4.5 of the Framework. Install the appropriate version or versions as defined by your needs.
To fetch the source code from the main Google Code repository, you'll need a Mercurial client. A good alternative for Microsoft Windows users is TortoiseHg which installs shell extensions so that Mercurial can be used from the Windows Explorer.
To run the tests, you'll need NUnit version 2.5.10 or higher.
Unfortunately though we target .NET 3.5 for running Noda Time on the desktop, the unit test library targets .NET 4. This is mostly so that we can easily run the tests against the PCL build. We would like to run the desktop build tests against .NET 3.5 and the PCL build tests against .NET 4, but that sort of subtlety seems to cause problems with the ability of test runners to autodetect which version they should load. We don't use any .NET 4 features in our tests though; if you hack at the project file to make it only target .NET 3.5, you should be able to test the desktop build that way, if you really need to.
To fetch the source code, just clone the Google Code repository:
> hg clone https://code.google.com/p/noda-time/
To build everything under Visual Studio, simply open the src\NodaTime-All.sln file.
To build with just the SDK and msbuild, run
> msbuild src\NodaTime-All.sln /property:Configuration=Debug
Execute the tests using your favourite NUnit test runner. For example:
> nunit-console src\NodaTime.Test\bin\Debug\NodaTime.Test.dll
(Include the other test DLLs should you wish to, of course.)
Note: If you build Noda Time under Mono but execute it under the Microsoft
.NET 4 64-bit CLR, you may see exceptions around type initializers and
RuntimeHelpers.InitializeArray. We believe this to be due to a
bug in .NET which the Mono compiler happens to trigger. We
would recommend that you use a binary built by the Microsoft C# compiler if you
wish to run using this CLR.
We have tested Mono support using Mono 2.10.5 and 2.10.8.
To build Noda Time under Linux, you typically need to install the following packages:
(These will add the other dependencies you need.)
Note that for Ubuntu specifically, you'll either need Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric) or later, or work out how to install an unofficial backport; earlier versions of Ubuntu do not include a suitable version of Mono.
To build Noda Time under OS X, download the latest stable
release of Mono. Be sure to choose the developer package, not the smaller
runtime-only package. To use the provided Makefile, you'll either need to
install Xcode or obtain make separately (for example, using
osx-gcc-installer to install just the open-source parts of Xcode).
To fetch the source code from the main Google Code repository, you'll need a Mercurial client.
To run the tests, you'll need NUnit version 2.5.10 or higher. (The version that comes with stable builds of Mono at the time of this writing doesn't support everything used by the unit tests of Noda Time.) Version 2.6.1 is recommended on non-Windows platforms due to an NUnit bug that causes tests to fail with a "Too many open files" exception when running some of the larger suites.
"NUnit Bug #993247: Tests fail with IOException: Too many open files"
To fetch the source code, just clone the Google Code repository:
$ hg clone https://code.google.com/p/noda-time/
Building is performed with make, using the included Makefile. (If you don't
have a working make, you can also run xbuild by hand; see Makefile for
the commands you'll need to run.)
$ cd noda-time $ make
This will build all the Noda Time main projects. The main assembly will be
written to src/NodaTime/bin/Debug/NodaTime.dll; this is all you need to use
Noda Time itself.
Other build targets are also available; again, see Makefile for documentation.
In particular, to build and run the tests, run:
$ make check
to use the default (probably Mono-supplied) version of NUnit to run the tests, or something like the following to override the location of the NUnit test runner:
$ make check NUNIT='mono ../NUnit-2.6.1/bin/nunit-console.exe'
All the source code and user/developer guide source is under the src directory. There are multiple projects:
Additionally the docs directory contains the source for the documentation, and JodaDump contains Java code to be used with NodaTime.CheckTimeZones.
There are four solutions, containing a variety of projects depending on the task at hand. The aim is to have everything you immediately need in one place, without too many distractions.