Contributing

Initial Setup

Thank you for forking our project! Before you can submit a pull request, there are a number of steps that need to be completed.

Building

The first step is to configure the powershell execution policy as the build relies on powershell scripts as part of its build. Launch powershell as an administrator and run the following command:

Set-ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned

NOTE: There is a separate execution policy for 64-bit Powershell and 32-bit Powershell. You must match with the bitness of the devenv.exe which may be 32-bit and therefore set the execution policy in the 32-bit PowerShell.

The next step is to get a rubberduck.dll build. To do this, you must be running Visual Studio as administrator.

If you have a release version installed, you need to uninstall it first. The installer registers COM components against the release build, in the install folder. You'll manually re-register these COM components in a minute, but first you need a build.

Building Rubberduck should automatically install the following Nuget packages (which may be changed as codebase develop):

• Antlr4.4.6.4
• Antlr4.CodeGenerator.4.6.4
• Antlr4.Runtime.4.6.4
• Castle.Core.4.1.1
• Castle.Windsor.4.0.0
• Moq.4.2.1507.118
• NLog.4.4.12
• NLog.Schema.4.4.12
• NUnit.3.9.0
• NUnit3TestAdapter.3.9.0- EasyHook.2.7.6578.1
• System.ValueTuple.4.4.0

Once you've built the solution, make sure the Rubberduck project is the solution's startup project, and that it's configured to launch your favorite VBE host on startup, so that Visual Studio automatically attaches its debugger to the process when you hit F5 to launch the solution:

If there were any build errors, it is possible that your debug session is loading the previous build of that assembly.

To prevent this, tweak the debugger settings:

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Registering the COM types

Building the Rubberduck solution should normally perform a registration of the COM types automatically for you. Refer to Build Process for full details.

Note: for historical information you can read about registering with regasm.exe. It is STRONGLY recommended that you do NOT use this with the current build process however.

Registering the add-in

Registering the COM types isn't enough. Every VBE host application will be looking for installed addins under a specific registry key in the HKCU hive.

Bring up the Windows Registry Editor, and depending on the bitness of the VBE host(s) you want to register Rubberduck with, create a Rubberduck.Extension key:

32-bit hosts:

HKCU/SOFTWARE/Microsoft/VBA/VBE/6.0/Addins/Rubberduck.Extension

64-bit hosts:

HKCU/SOFTWARE/Microsoft/VBA/VBE/6.0/Addins64/Rubberduck.Extension

The Rubberduck.Extension COM type was registered when you ran the regasm.exe command in the previous step. If you have both 32-bit and 64-bit VBE host applications and you want both to load the Rubberduck add-in, you'll need to create the two keys. Otherwise, just create the key that you need for the bitness of your VBE host.

Define the following values under the Rubberduck.Extension key:

• Description (string value): "Rubberduck"
• FriendlyName (string value): "Rubberduck"
• LoadBehavior (DWORD): 3

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Not sure where or how to start? See Architecture Overview.