building it

prerequisites

• Visual Studio 2019 or newer, with the "Universal Windows Platform development" workload installed (this grabs the Windows 10 SDK and the UWP/XAML build tools)
• Windows 10 SDK 10.0.19041.0 (the project also supports down to 10.0.17763.0, i.e. Windows 10 1809)

note

This is a legacy-style UWP project, not an SDK one - dotnet build won't work here. You need MSBuild with the UWP/XAML targets, which only exist with Visual Studio. There's also no test project.

opening & building

1. Open Fort.ind UWP.sln in Visual Studio
2. Pick a Platform (x86/x64/ARM/ARM64) and Configuration (Debug/Release) from the toolbar
3. Build with Ctrl+Shift+B

If you'd rather build from the command line (this is basically what CI does),

msbuild "Fort.ind UWP.sln" 
msbuild "Fort.ind UWP\Fort.ind UWP.csproj" /p:Configuration=Release /p:Platform=x64 /p:VisualStudioVersion=xx.0 /p:GenerateAppxPackageOnBuild=true /restore

note

A command-line build only compiles - it can't verify runtime or visual issues. Visual Studio's own deploy step (F5) is what actually refreshes the installed package; a plain command-line build followed by a manual install can end up running a stale app. For anything you wanna take a look at, build and press F5 in Visual Studio.

running & debugging

Just hit F5 in Visual Studio with a platform matching your machine (x64 is the common case) - it'll deploy and attach the debugger for you. A couple of things to know:

• You'll need Developer Mode (or "Sideload apps") turned on in Settings → Update & Security → For developers - VS will prompt you if it's off
• ARM/ARM64 builds need an actual ARM device or a remote machine to deploy to, since there's no ARM emulator for a typical x64 dev box

packaging & signing

The project is set up to sign packages with a test certificate (Fort.ind UWP_TemporaryKey.pfx), but that file isn't committed - Visual Studio will generate one for you automatically the first time you build locally.

For end users, installing a built package means:

1. Install the exported .cer certificate - into trusted people, not trusted root certs
2. Run the .msix/.appx, or just run the included scripts\Install.ps1 as admin, which handles the cert, VCLibs/WinUI runtime dependencies, and enabling sideloading all in one go

CI & versioning

CI (.github/workflows/build-msix.yml) builds x86/x64/ARM64 packages on every push to master and on pull requests; a v* tag additionally cuts a GitHub release.

Pull request builds are always unsigned. Any other build (a push to master, or a v* tag) is signed using a certificate stored in GitHub secrets, when one is configured - otherwise it falls back to building unsigned there too.

also! if you want to bump the version, its really simple just edit package.appxmanifest