Thursday, October 27, 2011

A# (ADA for .NET) with Visual Studio Integration

I decided I really needed to build RAPTOR from source.  The program is written in C# and and Ada targeting .NET (A#).   Dr. Carlisle released his last version of the A# compiler and a Visual Studio 2005 plugin via SourceForge in May 2006.  I installed the tool set into Visual Studio 2005 as described here on Windows 7 64-bit.  Although the integration installed it did not work after I patched  VS2005 for Windows 7 (KB928957, KB929470).

Since 2006 maintenance of the A# code was taken over by AdaCore.  They have released a downloadable version of GNAT that targets .NET 2.0 in the GNAT GPL packages at their LIBRE page.  Look for the package that targets dotnet-windows.  At the time of writing it was in a file named “gnat-gpl-2011-dotnet-windows-bin.exe” dated 11 May 2011.

The dotnet-windows package  includes Visual Studio integration.  Appears to be built around ProjectAggregator2 technology from the now defunct Visual Studio Integration Program (VSIP) SDK.  It successfully integrated with Visual Studio 2010 when I installed GNAT.  It might be possible to install the GNAT integration into the Visual Studio 2010 Shell (Integrated) Redistributable Package if you don’t have a full up VS2010 install.  My understanding is that VS2010 Shell can be used to support languages like F# and Python.

Anyways, after I installed GNAT GPL for dotnet I was able to open the raptor.sln in Visual Studio and start tracking down dependencies (missing dlls, files, x64 issues, etc.).