Setting up the IceStorm FPGA tools for Windows
There was recently a presentation by the team running the icestorm project over at the Manchester Hackspace.
Icestorm is a project that provides a fpga board for under $30 (about 25 Pounds in British money)
I decided to explore the idea of building the tools for it under windows
SCons builds with Visual Studio
For a while now I've been looking for a decent build system with a language I can easily write and debug.
During the very old days of Linux the main go to for a build system typically was *make* and *configure*. Configure would check the system to see if a library was present and its location, Make would use Makefile scripts to handle the actual compilation based on the results from configure. Surrounding these two was autotools which included autoconf and automake to try and make writing these sorts of scripts a lot easier. However, over time because of cross compatibility reasons, if you were new to this sort of thing, it could quite quickly become a rat's nest of code.
Building GTK3 / GtkSharp under Windows
Looking at the current NuGet packages for GtkSharp and the gtk3 binaries within GtkSharp.Win32.
These are not for the most recent version of Gtk3.
I decided to look into the process for building GTK3 and the latest version of GtkSharp under windows.
This also has the advantage of possibly using 64bit versions of GTK3.
GtkSharp - Part 5 - Themes and ClearText
One of the interesting features of GtkSharp and GTK3 is its theming ability. Although there doesn't seem to be a lot of documentation on handling this easily within .Net and GtkSharp
After a bit of digging around I've recently managed to get themes working with GtkSharp.
Also I've discovered a fix for cleartext to make the fonts look nicer under windows and to alter the dpi settings.
As with prior code, I've placed examples within a gitrepo of https://github.com/grbd/GBD.Blog.Examples.
GtkSharp - Part 4 - Handles and WithEvents Example
This is a second example of using GtkSharp within Visual Studio.
One of the interesting things we can setup is the use of Handles and WithEvents.
This means that within the code window for the form, we can use the drop down fields in the same way we would with windows forms.
I've included example code within https://github.com/grbd/GBD.Blog.Examples although for now this is VB only