Getting the SimPE Source

This small Tutorial is explaining what you have to do in order to download the complete SimPE sourcecode.

The most recent source is available from a SVN repository hosted on Sourceforge. SVN is something like CVS, but more sophisticated. The latest SimPE is stored at https://simpe.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/simpe/trunk/fullsimpe . The following Instructions explain how to get the sources from this location using TortoiseSVN

1. Getting an SVN Client.
First you need to have an SVN Client installed on your. I am using Tortoise SVN, as it simply hooks into the Windows Explorer, extending it's context menus with SVN specific commands.

You can download Tortoise SVN from http://tortoisesvn.net/downloads . Just get theoffered msi file and install it like any other Windows application.

2. Creating a folder for the local copy of the repository
This is a very simple step, as you just need to create a folder somewhere on your harddrive. This folder will contain all Files needed to compile SimPE after you did check out  the files from the SVN repository.

3. Checking out the sources
The last step is to get a local copy of the source files from the repository (aka. checking out the files ).


To do that, right click on the folder you just created. If Tortoise SVN was installed correct, you will notice that you have some new items in the poped up context menu. Select the Option SVN Checkout... to get your local copy. This will open the checkout Dialog.


The URL of the latest  SimPE sources is (as stated above) https://simpe.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/simpe/trunk/fullsimpe/ , but you can download different versions (like the .NET 1.1 branch from the SVN too. Just have a look at the online repository at http://svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/simpe/ to get the folders leading to the version you'd like to check out.

Most people certainly want to get the latest sources, so please put https://simpe.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/simpe/trunk/fullsimpe/ into the URL of repository textbox.

The text in the Checkout Directory textbox should point to the folder you just right clicked on, which is the one, where the sources will get downloaded to. Most of the time you should not touch this setting or any others (besides the URL of repository of course).

If you click on OK, the download of the sources will start.

4. Compile for the first time
After you downloaded the complete source, you can start compiling SimPE. You need to have the free Development Tool Visual Studio 2005 C# Express or the regular Visual Studio 2005 installed on your System to compile SimPE.

You may get some errors stating that referenced dlls were not found. All that are needed are available from any SimPE binary installation, and should also be available in the main Folder of the repository (the one you created in the second step).
You can solve the problems by deleting the missing reference from the references Section in the Project Explorer in VS 2005 (They are usually marked with an exclamation mark). Then right click on the References section of the project and select the Add... menu item.

In the Dialog that pops up now, select the Browse tab, and find the dll (either in a SimPE instalation folder, in the root folder (as created in Step 2) of the repository, or it's __Release Subfolder). Then simply hit OK, and VS 2005 knows the location of the dll on your system.

5. Getting Updates
You probably want to keep the checkedout sources (or parts of it) up to date. That means, if I checked in bugfixes or new code, you probably want to have that in your local copy to.
Simply right click on the root repository folder or any folder/file inside the repository, and select SVN update... from the context menu. That should start another download, updating the selected folders/and files with the versions stored in the repository.


That's it for the moment, hope this get's everyone started with the SimPE sources.