Getting started for developers

Welcome Developers! 🚀

Building BHoM from Source

Please follow the steps below:

Use git clone (or use GitHub desktop) to download the repositories in the list below.
Use your preferred IDE to build the solutions in the order as they appear below. We recommend Visual Studio Community.

🚩 Note: Build order 🚩

Choose, clone and build the repos in the order specified below.

Once you have built everything you need, you must re-build BHoM_UI. This is because BHoM_UI triggers a process that distributes all compiled dlls in the right UI folders.

This means that every time you change your code and recompile a Toolkit, you have to recompile also BHoM_UI for the changes to appear in your UI of choice (be it Rhino, Dynamo, others).

🔰 Pro tip 🔰

To reduce rebuild iterations, you might want to start the Debugging with your UI application attached. Not IDEs support this however (notably, not the Express editions of Visual Studio, but only the Community ones).

An alternative that always work is simply attaching to the process.

Mandatory base repos 🔴

Main repos

BHoM (object model schema)
BHoM_Engine
BHoM_Adapter
BHoM_UI

User interface(s)

Depending on the User interface software you want to use, you might want to build the following:

Rhinoceros_Toolkit
Grasshopper_Toolkit (requires Rhinoceros_Toolkit)
Excel_Toolkit
Dynamo_Toolkit

Optional base repos 🔵

These repos are sometimes used as stand-alone, and sometimes are also referenced by other repos.

You might find them useful 🚀

BHoM_Datasets - makes Datasets available (some test scripts might be using them)
Socket_Toolkit - send messages through Sockets. Some toolkits use this.
Mongo_Toolkit - database connection. Some toolkits use this.
Versioning_Toolkit - allows retro-compatibility of components (auto upgrade to newest version).