Build instructions
------------------

The Visual Basic demos have been built and tested with:

- Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 SP1 and .NET Framework Version 3.5 SP1

- Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework Version 4.0

Unpack the archive. The Visual Basic demo sources will be 
contained in the Ice-3.4.2\vb subdirectory.

You will need the Slice to C# translator and supporting executables
and libraries from Ice for C++. You can download a binary distribution
from the ZeroC web site, or you can build Ice for C++ yourself.

Binary distributions for the supported platforms are available at

  http://www.zeroc.com/download.html

To use Visual Basic (or other .NET languages) with Ice, you need
the run-time support provided by the Ice for .NET assembly (Ice.dll).
See ..\cs\INSTALL.VISUAL_C# for instructions on building the .NET
assembly.

Follow these steps to build the demos:

1) If you have not built Ice for C++ in the cpp subdirectory, set
   ICE_HOME to the directory of your Ice for C++ installation.
   For example:

   > set ICE_HOME=C:\Ice-3.4.2

2) Change to the top-level directory of the Visual Basic demos:

   > cd Ice-3.4.2\vb

3) Open config\Make.rules.mak.vb and review the comments that describe
   the settings you can modify. For example, you may wish to enable
   optimization.

4) Run nmake:

   > nmake /f Makefile.mak

For the Slice definitions, slice2cs is used to generate C# source code
and the C# compiler is used to compile the generated code into
a DLL. That DLL is then referenced from the Visual Basic project.

You can also build the demos using the Visual Studio solution located
in demo\demo.sln. Note that the demo projects require the Ice Visual
Studio Add-In. The add-in is installed automatically when you
use the Ice installer, or you can install the add-in manually by
following the instructions in ..\vsaddin\INSTALL.txt.


Running the demos
-----------------

To run the demos, you need to have the cpp\bin directory in your PATH
and the cs\bin directory in your DEVPATH. See the README file in each
demo directory for a description of the demo.
