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Writing Free Software – Part 4: configure.ac
In this section, we’ll create a minimalist configure.ac, re-name our Makefile to Makefile.am, generate a configure script, and use this configure script to produce a Makefile. The end result won’t do much more than our manually-created Makefile. It will, however, allow us to make use of the autoconf and automake infrastructure in future lessons. So…
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Writing Free Software – Part 3: Command line options
Introduction In this installment, we will look at parsing command-line options. We’re going to use Jon Pryor‘s NDesk.Options library. Since he has not made a .deb package yet, we’ll use curl to integrate NDesk.Options.cs into our codebase. Get back to our workspace $ cd ~/src/greeting Get curl $ sudo apt-get install curl Pull down a…
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Writing Free Software – Part 2: Makefiles
Okay, so now we know how to write hello world in C#, compile it and run it. Next, let’s try to automate the build portion a bit. It’s not going to be very much of an improvement to start out with; we’re just replacing the gmcs command with a make command. But it’s laying a…
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Writing Free Software – Part 1
There are a lot of folks who want to learn how to write software, I hear. So I’ll see if I can write something up about it. I’m going to assume that the reader has at their disposal an i386-class computer running Ubuntu or Debian. This will all probably work for other operating systems, but…
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autotools help on IRC
It has come to my attention that there is a lack of autotools (autoconf, automake, autoheader, libtool, etc) help on IRC. If anybody is looking, they might check out #mono on irc.gimp.net; there are quite a few folks there who are familiar with the suite, and if I can ever figure out how to get…
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To Prebuild or not to Prebuild?
So… On IRC today, John, Michael and I discussed rolling Prebuild and xbuild into one product. It seems that we’re duplicating effort and competing for each others’ users. It sounds to me like we should converge the codebases, and make Prebuild.exe a wrapper around the innards of xbuild. Thoughts?
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Taking a job at MS
So… next week, I start a contract with Microsoft in Redmond. I’ll be working on what seems like a fun project. I’ve enjoyed working at CarDomain for the last four months. Fun projects, a cohesive group, neat technology. I’m mostly moving on because a) I’ve been writing web pages for a long time and want…
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The Cretins
My brother’s motorcycle club, The Cretins, recently had an article published about them in the Seattle PI. They even quoted him. I didn’t realize he was the president of the club. The rumor goes that he missed a meeting, and wasn’t there to defend himself.