Guide to creating custom grasshopper 0.6.X components

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Permalink Reply by Ben Sitler on April 8, 2010 at 11:30am

David,

The Grasshopper App store! It sounds like a great new feature for the next Grasshopper release..as if you didn't have enough on your plate already, haha!

You could have a built in scheme for people to add both free and pay components just like Itunes, perhaps using Paypal or something...it would be like the universal Rhino developer installer on steroids.

Cheers,
Ben Sitler

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Permalink Reply by Andy Payne on April 8, 2010 at 12:03pm

Very interesting idea.

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Permalink Reply by David Rutten on April 8, 2010 at 12:22pm

Well I'm certainly not going to make anything commercial. The responsibility would be enormous. Another problem is that it is in fact very easy to make an evil component that will consistently crash Grasshopper on startup, or even wipe large parts of your hard-drive. I'm guessing nobody will purposefully upload destructive components, but we have to somehow cater for this possibility.

--
David Rutten
david@mcneel.com
Poprad, Slovakia

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Permalink Reply by Jes Tonsgaard on April 11, 2010 at 1:09am

Being from the generation of file-sharing, I tend to favor the free "open-source" version....
But a built in app-browser sounds very interesting....

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Permalink Reply by David Rutten on April 11, 2010 at 2:42am

Open source doesn't suit many people. If you're an employee at a large firm, it's often already difficult enough to get access to a tech support forum, let alone post some of your work online.

I fully agree that sharing is a good thing, I'm just not 100% convinced the principle extends to open-source as well.

--
David Rutten
david@mcneel.com
Poprad, Slovakia

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Permalink Reply by Steve Lewis on April 11, 2010 at 5:36pm

Ben

thanks for the document. It is very thorough and I was able to create the component example. Great!

However, could you provide some information regarding how to debug a component, and for that matter a Rhino plug in, within the VS IDE?

Once you copy the compiled .GHA DLL to the grasshopper plug in direcrtory, how can you debug the code using "breaks" ? What settngs do i need to set in the VS Properties dialogue box of the project? How do you get rhino and grasshopper to run while in debug mode?

Cheers

Steve

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Permalink Reply by Steve Lewis on April 13, 2010 at 12:08am

Im noting that Im not able to install the RMA.VisualStudioWizards.dll to my GAC when dragging an ddropping. Im running windows 7 Professional 64 bit. I note that I can do it when running Windows XP 64 bit. Anyone else experienced this?

Do I need the RMA.VisualStudioWizards.dll installed to sucessfully stop at debug points in my code when in debug mode?

Cheers

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Permalink Reply by David Rutten on April 13, 2010 at 2:35am

No.

RMA.VisualStudioWizards are only used to facilitate making Rhino RHP plugins. But they're not even required for that, just handy.

--
David Rutten
david@mcneel.com
Poprad, Slovakia

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Permalink Reply by David Rutten on April 13, 2010 at 2:14am

To debug, do the following:

1) Inside the _GrasshopperDeveloperSettings Command, uncheck the "Memory load..." option. (It's still called *.EHC, but it's supposed to be galled *.GHA).

2a) If you're using Visual Studio professional, then go to the Project Properties, Debug tab and set the "Start action" to "Start external program". Navigate towards Rhino.exe as the external program.

2b) If you're using Visual Studio Express this option may not exist, in which case you have to close Visual Studio, find the YourProject.vbproj.user (or YourProject.csproj.user if you're using C#) file, open it in a text editor and add the the debug action property groups. My *.vbproj.user files look like this:


<PropertyGroup Condition=" '$(Configuration)|$(Platform)' == 'Debug|AnyCPU' ">
<StartAction>Program</StartAction>
<StartProgram>C:\Program Files\Rhinoceros 4.0\System\Rhino4.exe</StartProgram>
</PropertyGroup>
<PropertyGroup Condition=" '$(Configuration)|$(Platform)' == 'Release|AnyCPU' ">
<StartAction>Program</StartAction>
<StartProgram>C:\Program Files\Rhinoceros 4.0\System\Rhino4.exe</StartProgram>
</PropertyGroup>


--
David Rutten
david@mcneel.com
Poprad, Slovakia

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Permalink Reply by David Rutten on April 13, 2010 at 2:16am

Just for clarity:

--
David Rutten
david@mcneel.com
Poprad, Slovakia

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Permalink Reply by Steve Lewis on April 13, 2010 at 2:59pm

Dvaid thank you so much for the reply. I will try your suggestion and let you know how I get on,

cheers.

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Permalink Reply by David Rutten on April 13, 2010 at 3:05pm

Typically this sort of thing should be set up by a Project Wizard, but we haven't written one yet. Since VS 2010 is out now, has anybody tried to see if they have made this UI available in the new Express editions?

--
David Rutten
david@mcneel.com
Poprad, Slovakia

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