Mapscript .NET, compile

[Bart van den Eijnden]

Hi list,

I finally tried to compile Mapscript .NET and I thought I'd share the
process I went through and ask a few questions. Let me start with the
questions :-) :

1) why won't the generated mapscript_wrap.c file compile out of the box
(see below)?
2) what is the difference between mapscript.dll and mapscript_csharp.dll?
3) using the utilities eg shpdump I do get a few unhandled exceptions. Is
that supposed to be the case?

Shape 1 has 1 part(s)
bounds (362153.9375, 3651581.75) (413756.1875, 3708708)

Unhandled Exception: System.NullReferenceException: Object reference not
set to
an instance of an object.
    at ShapeDump.Main(String[] args)


What I did is:

* download SWIG from
http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/swig/swigwin-1.3.24.zip
* I put swig.exe and a few other files needed in the mapscript/csharp
directory (mainly the contents of the swig lib directory)
* I ran nmake /f makefile.vc but ran into a problem

The mapscript_wrap.c file generated by SWIG would not compile, so I
removed the last bit, saved the file, and made sure it would not be
generated again by commenting out one line in the makefile.vc.

This is the part I had to remove from mapscript_wrap.c

if (msSetup() != MS_SUCCESS)
{
     msSetError(MS_MISCERR, "Failed to set up threads and font cache",
     "msSetup()");
}

This is the line I commented in the makefile.vc in order not to
re-generate the SWIG C file:

interface: ../mapscript.i
#       $(SWIG) -csharp -o mapscript_wrap.c ../mapscript.i

The only problem I had left was that my c sharp compiler (csc.exe) which
is part of the .NET framework was not in my path so I used the following
in my makefile.vc:

CSC = c:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v1.1.4322\csc.exe

Best regards,
Bart

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