Everything about Nuget packages
I updated my nuget packages to support Visual Studio 2017 (v141):
Using this opportunity, I dropped support for Visual Studio 2010.
And now there is Voro++ on Nuget. Voro++ is a library and utility, written by Chris Rycroft (with Applied Mathematics in Harvard SEAS) for compute Voronoi cells für 3D data. I use his lib actually to compute natural neighbors in my particle data sets. For me, Voro++ is better suited than other libs, like e.g. qhull, for several reasons: it is easy to use, streamlined for 3D, and natively support periodic boundary conditions. The single drawback I found, there are no official binary releases for Windows. And that is why I started this nuget package.
The library’s source code is rather clean and compiles without problem in Visual Studio. So all I did, was compiling the static library for the four latest Visual C++ versions, and I put the nuget package together. My Visual Studio solution and project files are also publicly available on bitbucket: https://bitbucket.org/sgrottel_nuget/voro
The package contains the static library, the header files, some files from the documentation, and the command line tool built with MSVC 2015. If you only want the command line tool and don’t care for the lib, simply download the nuget package, unzip it (yes, nuget packages are basically zip files), and you’ll find the exe in the tools subdirectory. For the full documentation of the library, go the Chris’ website or the original source code package.
What I didn’t include in the nuget package are any samples. But compiling them for yourself is as simple as it could be:
Be sure to deactivate precompiled headers and to make the project empty.
Just use any file from Chris’ source code package into the project.
4. And you’re done! Compile it and run it by a push of a button.
Have fun!
I adopted yet another nuget package: Lua
The reason, of course, is MegaMol, more precisely an upcoming addition to MegaMol enabling scripting of all internal management functions. After some thought, we opted for Lua as scripting language in our project. Building Lua is no big deal. But I also wanted the build process of MegaMol as a whole to be a simple as possible. On Windows this calls for nuget.
Of course, the nuget package already existed, but it was old. Instead of just starting another one, I contacted the original authors of the coapp team. They were happy to grant me access to the package, so that I could update to the new binaries. I will try my best to keep it up to date and to support many Visual Studio versions and settings.
I present you another NuGet package: GLFW. Ok. Originally redxdev created the package. And I only took the official prebuilt binaries from www.glfw.org and repacked them. All that fun for the support of Visual Studio 2015.
NuGet is a handy package system for Visual Studio. Originally meant for Dotnet libraries it was extended some time to support native C++ projects as well. The only catch is, that the packages need to be made especially for NuGet. There are some, but by far not all which one (I) needs for the daily work. Most problematic is that many packages do not support Visual Studio 2013. And that is even today, as Visual Studio 2015 is almost here.
So there is only one thing to do: join the fray! Well, I could stay out of it and continue to grumble about it, but let’s just keep that as plan b. So, here it is; my first NuGet package:
(with kind support of the author)
And this will not be the last you’ve seen of me.
