Development Building

Building & Running

This page describes how to build FindRomCover from source and produce release archives.

Prerequisites

Requirement	Notes
Windows, Linux, or macOS	The application targets net10.0 and uses Avalonia for the UI
.NET 10.0 SDK	Version pinned by global.json with rollForward: latestMajor
Visual Studio 2022+ or Rider	Optional; the CLI is sufficient
Web engine (runtime only)	On Windows, the Microsoft Edge WebView2 Runtime; on Linux, WebKitGTK from your distribution; macOS uses the built-in WKWebView. Missing engines only disable the embedded web tabs

Clone and build

git clone https://github.com/purelogiccode/FindRomCover.git
cd FindRomCover
dotnet build CSharp_FindRomCover.sln

A warning-free build is expected: the projects enable Meziantou, Roslynator, and Microsoft.CodeAnalysis analyzers.

Run from source

dotnet run --project FindRomCover

The application starts with the folders from your last session. You can pass startup folders as arguments:

dotnet run --project FindRomCover -- "D:\Covers" "D:\ROMs"

Run tests

dotnet test CSharp_FindRomCover.sln

See Testing for details and the full test layout.

Publish

Published builds are framework-dependent. The output is written under FindRomCover/bin/Release/net10.0/<rid>/publish:

dotnet publish FindRomCover/FindRomCover.csproj -c Release -r win-x64 --self-contained false
dotnet publish FindRomCover/FindRomCover.csproj -c Release -r linux-x64 --self-contained false
dotnet publish FindRomCover/FindRomCover.csproj -c Release -r osx-arm64 --self-contained false

Add -p:PublishSingleFile=true to bundle the managed assemblies into a single executable in the publish folder.

Zip the contents as release_<version>_<rid>.zip (for example release_3.3.0_win-x64.zip) to match the naming used on the Releases page.

Note: Published builds are framework-dependent. Users need the .NET 10.0 Runtime — the Windows Desktop Runtime is not required, because the UI is Avalonia rather than WPF.

Project settings worth knowing

Setting	Value
Target framework	net10.0
Language version	C# 14
Nullable	Enabled
UI framework	Avalonia 12.1.4
Assembly/file version	3.3.0 (kept in FindRomCover.csproj)
mame.dat	Copied to the output directory on every build
settings.dat	Never copied to the output directory

Note: The test project still declares version 3.2.2; keep it in sync with the app project when preparing a release. See CI/CD.

Documentation build

The docs site uses MkDocs Material:

pip install -r docs/requirements.txt
mkdocs serve

Open http://127.0.0.1:8000. To produce the static site:

mkdocs build --strict

The output lands in site/ (not committed). See CI/CD for how it is published.

Wiki generation

The GitHub wiki is generated from the same docs/ sources:

pwsh ./scripts/Sync-Wiki.ps1 -OutputPath wiki-out

The script rewrites links for wiki page names and writes _Sidebar.md and _Footer.md.

Common build problems

Problem	Solution
NETSDK1045 / SDK not found	Install the .NET 10 SDK; check global.json
Missing mame.dat at runtime	Rebuild; the file is copied automatically, or copy it manually
Analyzer warnings fail the build	Fix the warnings; do not suppress them without a good reason
Web tabs do not load	Install the WebView2 Runtime on Windows or WebKitGTK on Linux, then restart the application

Related pages

• Testing
• CI/CD
• Contributing