BuildingTheCode.md

Building the code

1. Clone the repository

• Clone the repository using one of the following commands

  git clone https://github.com/Microsoft/axe-windows.git
  

  or

  git clone git@github.com:Microsoft/axe-windows.git
  

• Select the created directory

  cd axe-windows
  

2. Install the HeatWave extension for Visual Studio

The CLI_Installer project uses WiX 4.X. It will build correctly from the command line, but if you intend to use Visual Studio's IDE, you should consider installing the HeatWave extension for VS2022. The IDE will continue to work without this extension, but you may encounter errors from the CLI_Installer project.

3. Open the solution in Visual Studio

• Use the src/AxeWindows.sln file to open the solution.

4. Build and run unit tests

For details about how the code is organized, please visit the solution overview.

If you need more information on how to set up your development environment, please visit the development environment setup page.

Building the NuGet package

Because the default dev environment does not include nuget.exe, the default behavior of the CI project is to skip packaging the files into the .nupkg file. Please follow these steps if you need to build a local copy of the NuGet package.

• Install nuget.exe from https://www.nuget.org/downloads and ensure that its location is included in your PATH environment variable. We currently use nuget.exe version 5.X in our build pipelines, but we reserve the right to move to a different version at any point in time.
• Add CreateAxeWindowsNugetPackage=true to your environment variables. This variable will be evaluated when the CI project is built.

Testing

We use the unit test framework from Visual Studio. Find more information in our FAQ section.