This quickstart covers how to obtain and set up the development environment in order to start extending HeuristicLab. The following points will be treated

• Obtaining the source
• Building HeuristicLab
• Creating your own plugin
• For the experienced

Obtaining the source

Here we will use the sources of the current stable build. The advantage is that these can be built without any prerequisites. You only require a current version of Visual Studio or SharpDevelop and the .NET framework.

• Download the latest stable branch sources: ​ Source zip.

For the sake of simplicity I will assume that you unpack the archive into the folder HeuristicLab\stable on your hard drive. The HeuristicLab folder will be called HeuristicLab Root, likewise we'll call the stable folder Stable Root.

Building HeuristicLab

Creating your own plugin

For the experienced

At some point it might be beneficial for you to build against the code in our SVN repositories. The advantage is that you can update it and get new features as we release them. Also you will get notice of breaking changes to our API earlier. You'll have to install ​Tortoise SVN because the build process makes use of one of its tools (SubWCRev).

• Check out the SVN repository of the stable branch at ​http://dev.heuristiclab.com/svn/hl/core/stable.