Help to be helped (1 Viewer)

[PTCoder]

I think that if one of the current developers took the time to write a small "developer starting guidelines" the number of programmers willing to help would increase exponentially.
I’m not an experienced c# programmer but I have been programming small microprocessors in C and “big†ones in VB for many years, and still trying to understand the program flux with no help is a taunting task.
10, 20 minutes of the current developers would benefit all the mediaportal community!

 

[mzemina]

The majority of the developers are neck deep (maybe deeper) working on bug fixes and trying to get ver 0.2.0.0 out to us all. Maybe once they are able to get a stable release (we all want that) and have a little breather - then maybe one (maybe more would be better?) would be able to add more to the existing docs.

BTW - What specifically (please no general thoughts) are you looking for that would help you out?

 

[mPod]

Replace "CVS" with "SVN", the rest is up2date: https://www.team-mediaportal.com/articles/howtos/how_to_write_a_plugin.html

 

[HÃ¥rek]

I just started with MediaPortal a few days ago. I have some experience with a few small projects in Visual C# 2005 Express.
This is what I have found so far:

DirectX SDK must be installed.
TortoiseSVN must be installed.

Create a new directory for the download. Right click and select TortoiseSVN -> Checkout
Use https://svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/mediaportal/trunk/mediaportal
This will take a while, it wil transfer 65 MB. The last line should say “Completed: At revision xxxxâ€
I had some errors here to begin with, because SourceForge went down for maintenance.

It might be good idea to make a local copy now, to keep as a reference so you do not need to download it all again if you want to start over from the beginning.

Start Visual C# 2005 Express.
Choose MediaPortal.VC#Express.sln
You will see that the solution contains 24 projects.
Select “Project – Set StartUp Projects…†and choose “MediaPortal†from the list “Single startup projectâ€.
Build, and see that it succeeds.

You will need to manually copy some files and folders from xbmc\bin\Release to xbmc\bin\Debug:
language\
skin\
weather\
keymap.xml
CaptureCardDefinitions.xml

Now you should be able to run from inside Visual C#.

Everything starts in xbmc\MediaPortal.cs This will launch configuration.exe, which is found in Configuration\Startup.cs.
The configuration wizard is then Configuration\WizardForm.cs.

However, debugging with breakpoints outside MediaPortal.cs is not possible? Does anybody know how to do this?

 

[PTCoder]

Thanks

Thanks to all, but my dificulty isn't compiling (thats the easy part), but folowing the code itself, initialy its very straight forward, check if this and that is installed, start another thread with the splashscreen, load definitions from various xml files... but than it starts to get more dificult, with directx calls and god knows what event handling.
When i made my initial post i was thinking about something like a fluxogram (hope the word exists in english!), and an event handling list.

 

[Rudolph]

It would be nice if there was a description of classes created for mediaportal that can be used by other developers, and how to use them. and maybo some more complex examples, of how to play with the screen.

This would help new programmers, and prevent people from writing there own classes when this is not neccesary, that will keep the code smaller.

I realise that the programmers are busy, however it could mean that the nr of programmers increases.

for example I was a delphi programmer, I have a lot of problems interfacing the minesweeper class to Mediaportal.

Till now I didn't search for help on the IRC, I have spend much more time in the interface between media portal then in developing the actual game class. and I have still problems with that interfacing.

the initial documentation of frodo how to write a plugin is a great start. however I needed more information to create my first plugin,

Maybe this only counts for me, but I expect that other people have the same problems, and could greatly benefit from it.

Rudolph