Mono.Mozilla on Windows

Alexandre Gomes posted on his blog his experiences getting Winforms+Mono.Mozilla building and running on Windows.

First of all, I’d like to thank him for taking the time to try this out; I’m building regularly on Windows and I try to keep things simple, but things do always slip past unnoticed (especially when trying to keep linux, win+vs2k3 and win+vs2k5 in synch), so it’s great to have an external pair of eyes looking at your stuff :)

He had some problems getting things up and running, so I thought I’d leave some pointers to help out those who want to test this out on Windows. Do check out his post so it’s easier to follow along.

Building

You don’t need the whole mozilla shell to setup the headers, the only thing you need is

• the xulrunner sdk
• xpidl.exe (from the xulrunner sdk)
• libIDL-0.6.dll and glib-1.2.dll (from the wintools zip)

There’s now a make.cmd on the “build” directory that does the same as the Makefile, so the steps are:

• unzip the xulrunner sdk somewhere
• put xpidl.exe and the two dlls in the build directory
• open a command prompt, go to the build directory, and run make [path-to-xulrunnersdk].

In the include and linker configurations, you only need to point to your newly created build/include and build/lib, respectively. These contain everything that is in the sdk plus the extra header files.

The missing nsAppDirectoryDefs header has been added, so you don’t need to google for it anymore. Ooopsie :)

Running:

To run an application, you always need to have in the same directory:

• the contents of the xulrunner runtime package
• your app’s exe :)
• the mono.mozilla dll
• the xulbrowser.dll

If you want to have the runtime in a different directory, you’ll need to first register it: in a command prompt, go to the xulrunner runtime directory, and run “xulrunner.exe –register-global”.

Then, on the build directory, run setup-runtime.cmd [path-to-your-application-exe], which will create some directories that are required to be where your app is.

Other problems
The browser problems mentioned (unable to input text) have been fixed, so the latest version should be fine.

The Mono.Mozilla project is also fixed.

As for the TortoiseSVN problems, I use tortoise for all my work and it’s always worked great :p
Of course, I’ve never used the _svn variant, it’s too much trouble and incompatibility just to have svn with webapps on vstudio. I suggest using the regular version for fun and happiness :)

Thanks again to Alexandre, and do nag me if anything goes wrong.