05-buildneodevtools.md

NEO Blockchain Quick Start Guide for .NET Developers

NEO Blockchain C# Developers Center of Excellence

The neo-csharpcoe project is an "umbrella" project for several initiatives related to providing tools and libraries (code), frameworks, how-to documentation, and best practices for enterprise application development using .NET/C#, C#.NEO and the NEO Blockchain software platform.

The neo-csharpcoe is an independent, free, open source project that is 100% community-supported by people like yourself through your contributions of time, energy, passion, promotion, and donations.

To learn more about contributing to the neo-csharpcoe, click here.

Activity 5 - Build and test NEO developer tool projects (from source)

Purpose

The purpose of this activity is to build the NEO developer tools from the sources downloaded and unpacked in the previous activity.

Goals, Non-Goals and Assumptions

• Ensure you have a working and properly configured set of NEO developer tools for creating and building smart contracts in Visual Studio with the C# programming language

Principles

• Provide reliable documentation: timely, accurate, visual, and complete
• Save as much of a person's time as possible
• Use open source software whenever possible

Drivers

• Need in the NEO .NET developer community to have concise and easy-to-follow documentation to enable people to get up to speed developing NEO smart contracts in as short a time as possible

Build and test NEO developer tool projects (from source)

Build the Neon NEO MSIL Transcompiler

1. Open the neo-compiler project in Visual Studio by double-clicking neo-compiler.sln in the C:\NEO\neo-compiler-master\neo-compiler-master folder created in Activity 2 - Download and unpack NEO developer tool projects (source).

   

   Figure 5.1. Open neo-compiler.sln in Visual Studio 2017

2. Uncheck the message Ask me for every project in this solution and click OK.

   

   Figure 5.2. Visual Studio: Uncheck the message Ask me for every project in this solution and click OK

3. Visual Studio will open with the project displayed in the Solution Explorer to the right.

   

   Figure 5.3. Visual Studio: Solution Explorer

4. Right-click the solution name neo-compiler near the top of the Solution Explorer and select Rebuild Solution. Several things will happen the first time you do this; for example, the referenced Nuget packages will be downloaded and refreshed in addition to the sources being compiled to create the NEO compiler set.

   

   Figure 5.4. Visual Studio: Rebuild Solution

5. Rebuild Solution completes.

   

   Figure 5.5. Rebuild Solution completes

6. Right-click the project name neon in the Solution Explorer and select Publish.

   NOTE: This is the single most troublesome set of tasks in the entire Quick Start process. Follow these manual workarounds carefully.

   

   Figure 5.6. neon Project: Publish...

7. The following Publish page will appear in Visual Studio. Select Publish on the left side (and not Connection Services). Click the Publish button to continue (using the default settings).

   

   Figure 5.7. neon Project: Publish to Folder

8. When you see "Publish failed", this is the problem area. Click OK to close this dialog box.

   

   Figure 5.8. neon Project: Published failed

9. In the Output pane at the bottom of the screen, change the drop down "Show output from:" from Build to Build Order. Note the highlighted error message about the missing neon.dll. It's not missing - it is in a different directory and needs to be manually copied to where Visual Studio expects to find this DLL.

   

   Figure 5.9. neon Project: neon.dll is missing (but not really)

10. Open Windows Explorer and navigate to the folder C:\NEO\neo-compiler-master\neo-compiler-master\neon\bin\Release\netcoreapp1.0. We need to copy neon.dll from this folder to the folder where Visual Studio expects to find it.

    

    Figure 5.10. neon Project folder: C:\NEO\neo-compiler-master\neo-compiler-master\neon\bin\Release\netcoreapp1.0

11. Right-click on neon.dll and select Copy.

    

    Figure 5.11. neon Project folder: Copy neon.dll to the clipboard

12. In Windows Explorer, navigate to C:\NEO\neo-compiler-master\neo-compiler-master\neon\obj\Release\netcoreapp1.0. Right-click in the file list and select Paste to paste a copy of neon.dll into this folder.

    NOTE: This is the obj/Release/netcoreapp1.0 folder path.

    

    Figure 5.12. neon Project folder: C:\NEO\neo-compiler-master\neo-compiler-master\neon\obj\Release\netcoreapp1.0

13. Back in Visual Studio, click the Publish button to publish the neon project files a second time (using the default settings).

    

    Figure 5.13. neon Project: Republish the Project

14. This time, Publish completes successfully.

    

    Figure 5.14. neon Project: Publish Succeeded

15. The neon project files have been published to C:\NEO\neo-compiler-master\neo-compiler-master\neon\bin\Release\PublishOutput.

    NOTE: Remember this path because in the next set of tasks, we need to attend to the Windows Path search path environment variable.

    

    Figure 5.15. neon Project: PublishOutout Folder

At this point, the neo-compiler project has been built and published. The remaining tasks are to:

• Configure Windows Path search environment variable, and
• Test that the neon transcompiler works properly with a Visual Studio NEO smart contract project.

16. To configure the Path environment variable, from the Windows start menu, enter "system" and select the System control panel app. In the left pane, click Advanced system settings to display the System Properties dialog box.

    

    Figure 5.16. Control Panel: System Properties

17. On the System Properties dialog box, click Environment Variables... to display the Environment Variables dialog box. Note the Path environment variable in the System variables section. Select Path and clck Edit....

    

    Figure 5.17. Control Panel: System Properties: Environment Variables

18. Click New to add the PublishOutput path to the current list of folders in the Path environment variable. Use C:\NEO\neo-compiler-master\neo-compiler-master\neon\bin\Release\PublishOutput for the value of the new path. Click OK twice to close the 2 Environment Variables dialog boxed and return the the System control panel app.

    

    Figure 5.18. Control Panel: System Properties: Path Environment Variable

Test the Neon NEO MSIL Transcompiler

19. We'll go step-by-step. Firt, open a new Windows Command Prompt. Enter Path and press Enter to inspect the current value of the Path environment variable. You should be able to find the PublishOutput path in the list (closer to the end of the list but it isn't necessarily the very last element of the list).

    

    Figure 5.19. Command Prompt: Path Environment Variable

20. Open Visual Studio 2017 to create a new NEO smart contract project.

    

    Figure 5.20. Visual Studio 2017

21. Select File > New > Project... to open the New Project dialog box. Select Visual C#. Select NeoContract. Click OK to close this dialog box and create a new NeoContract solution and project in Visual Studio.

    

    Figure 5.21. Visual Studio: Create a New NeoContract Project

22. Visual Studio may take a few minutes to create the NeoContract project.

    

    Figure 5.22. Visual Studio: Creating the NeoContract Project

23. Right-click on the NeoContract project folder and select Build. Note the highlighted messages in the Build section of the Output panel. These 2 message indicate the Visual Studio was able to create both the NEO virtual machine byte code file as well as the Application Binary Interace (ABI) file (in JSON format).

    NOTE: If you don't see these 2 messages, the most likely senarios are:

    • neon.dll wasn't published properly. Go back to Task 6 of this activity.
    • The Path environment variable was not set correctly. Go back to Task 16 of this activity.
    • You had opened Visual Studio before you set the Path environment variable. Close Visual Studio and then go back to Task 20.

    

    Figure 5.23. Visual Studio: Building the NeoContract Project

Build the Neo-Gui-Developer Node/Wallet

25. Open the neo-compiler project in Visual Studio by double-clicking neo-gui.sln in the C:\NEO\neo-gui-developer-master\neo-gui-developer-master folder created in Activity 2 - Download and unpack NEO developer tool projects (source).

    

    Figure 5.24. Open neo-gui.sln in Visual Studio 2017

26. Uncheck the message Ask me for every project in this solution and click OK.

    

    Figure 5.25. Uncheck the message Ask me for every project in this solution and click OK

27. Visual Studio will open with the project displayed in the Solution Explorer to the right.

    

    Figure 5.26. Visual Studio: Solution Explorer

28. (OPTIONAL) If you are comfortable making code changes to a Windows C# .NET Webforms application, navigate to the Mainform.cs source file in the UI folder. Right-click this file and select View Code. Scroll down to the MainForm() constructor method. At end of the constructor, add the highlighted single line of code:

    this.Text - "neo-gui-dev - " + Settings.Default.DataDirectoryPath; 

    Type ctrl+s to save your changes to this source file. This single line of code with display the blockchain database folder name in the app's title bar next to app's name. This is a useful practice when you're using multiple sets of JSON configuration files (more about these later).

    

    Figure 5.27. Optional source changes

Test the Neo-Gui-Developer Node/Wallet

28. Still in Visual Studio with the neo-gui.sln solution open (developer version), click Start to run neo-gui with the Visual Studio debugger.

    

    Figure 5.28. neo-gui: Start with Visual Studio Debugger

29. If this is the very first time you have worked with a NEO project, you may be prompted to install a root certificate into the Windows certificate store. Click Yes.

    

    Figure 5.29. Accept NEO Root Certificate

30. The neo-gui (developer version) app should open and begin syncing with the NEO testnet network. You should see the block counts in the bottom-right corner increase over time as well as the the green progress bar begin to animate. Click Wallet > Exit to close the Neo-Gui-Developer Node/Wallet app.

    

    Figure 5.30. neo-gui (Developer Version) App

The tasks for this activity are complete. Proceed to Activity 6 - Download, install, and test Docker platform.

References

• [NEOTUTORIAL] NEO Project, NEO smart contract tutorial from http://docs.neo.org/en-us/sc/tutorial.html
• [NEONCOMPILER] NEO Project, Neon NEO MSIL Transcompiler from https://github.com/neo-project/neo-compiler.
• [NEOGUIDEVWALLET] NEO Project, hNeo-Gui-Developer Node/Wallet from hhttps://github.com/CityOfZion/neo-gui-developer.