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: [[http://builder.heuristiclab.com:8080/repository/download/bt11/.lastSuccessful/HeuristicLab%20stable%20sources%20r%7Bbuild.number%7D.zip?guest=1| 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 ==

If you have Visual Studio 2012 or later installed you can use the Build.cmd script that 

 * Open the solution file HeuristicLab.ExtLibs.sln in your IDE of choice and build it.
 * Open the solution file HeuristicLab 3.3.sln and build it.
 * All assemblies are compiled to sources\bin.
 * Start HeuristicLab 3.3.exe from sources\bin. 

For Linux users, check out the HeuristicLab and Mono HowTo for more information on how to compile HeuristicLab with Mono on Linux. 

== 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 [[http://tortoisesvn.net|Tortoise SVN]] because the build process makes use of one of its tools (SubWCRev). You need to have the binary path (bin) of TortoiseSVN (usually `C:\Program Files\TortoiseSVN\bin`) in your PATH environment variable.

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