notes.md

Contrac Developer Notes

Building and deploying

MSIX and getting it to the Store

• Need to create the MSIX first

  • Update the version number in corgo.toml
  • Update the version number in AAI
  • x64
    • cargo build --release
    • set x64 in AAI and build MSIX
  • x86
    • rustup run stable-i686-pc-windows-msvc cargo build --release
    • set x86 in AAI and build MSIX
  • To run locally you might need to create a new cert and set it.
  • Remember that the packager takes the release not debug target
  • Remember to build both x86 and x64 versions

• Bundle up the files to github and label the release

  • Drag the two MSIX and maybe two exes to the release
  • Add a tag of the form v0.n.0

• Submit to store

  • https://partner.microsoft.com/en-us/dashboard/windows/overview
  • Remember to update the release notes

To build x86 32-bit app

rustup run stable-i686-pc-windows-msvc cargo build --release

In Advanced Application Install go to Package Definitions / Builds and set to x86

Overall Approach and Learnings

On Windows, by default, Rust starts a console. If you want a Windows app put the following at the top of main.rs.

#![windows_subsystem = "windows"] 

The graph rendering in Contrac is a hack. Since there are currently no easy-to-use drawing capabilties with native-windows-gui, Contrac uses a collection of small image controls to represent the bars of the graph. That said, there maybe now a graphing library. That has the potential to remove a lot of wonky code.

Things that might be useful to PR into native-windows-gui:

• Minimize and restore windows functionality that is working
• Maybe enable WS_CLIPSIBLINGS in flags for controls and enable z-ordering
• Provide more access to the nwg::win32 helper functions
• Add utility functions to edit box for scrolling

Recommended Visual Studio Extensions for Development

• https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=rust-lang.rust
• https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=vadimcn.vscode-lldb