README.zxid-win32

As of version 0.11, January 2007, the Windows port is experimental.

Only well researched questions, please.

Right now the following has been accomplished

1. Compiles cleanly (xmingw cross compile)

2. CGI executables such as zxid and zxidhlo are produced (but not tested)

3. zxid.dll is produced

Todo

• Call zxid.dll from C# (non COM route)

• Make zxid.dll into COM object and call it from C#

• Test and debug that the zxid_simple() API really works on WIndows.

1 Building

Current approach is to use the MinGW environment. Cross compilation on Linux host and MinGW target is best tested. Native compile with MinGW may work, but author is not able to test this compination. Nobody has tried compilation using Visual C, reports welcome.

Generally you would proceed as follows

  make default zxid.dll TARGET=xmingw   # Cross compile

or

  make default zxid.dll TARGET=mingw    # Native compile

There is no make install, thus you will have to manually put things in right places and create /var/zxid directory hieararchy (What would be appropriate place for this in Windows?)

ZXID depends on libcurl, openssl, and zlib. For best results you should compile these yourself and link them statically into the binaries and dll. It may be possible to use binaries from other sources (such as doenload sites of the respective projects), but this has not been tested.

2 Binary distribution

I distribute an unsupported binary package. You can find it in http://zxid.org/zxid-REL-win32-bin.zip

It was cross compile and probably works on Windows 2000. I do not have resources or intent to test more widely.

3 Calling ZXID from C#

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Text;
using System.Runtime.InteropServices;

namespace HelloZXID
{
    class Program
    {
        [DllImport("zxid.dll")]
        static extern int zxid_version();

        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            int a = zxid_version();
            Console.WriteLine("ZXID version is --- " + a.ToString());
            Console.ReadLine();
        }
    }
}