How to work with AMSN source on Windows?

[Innocent]

Hi everybody!
First of all, I must say that I've googled throughout whole the forum and read all the wiki articles regarding my question - but no luck, all the information is for *nix platforms.
So, here is the question: How to work with AMSN source on Windows? Are there some kind of IDE's where I can just press "compile & run", and then .exe application of AMSN is created?
For over a month I am struggling, all I read is very huge manuals how to use SVN and how to do the makefile kind of stuff, but nothing about working and debugging AMSN like we do it in C++ or in Delphi for example.
Thank you

[kjir]

aMSN is written (mainly) in Tcl/Tk, you may want to look for that, I'm sure you'll find plenty of resources on the web. Also Tcl is an interpreted language, so no compilation needed...

[Innocent]

Yeah, indeed I have noticed that it is TCL/Tk, but unfortunately in the whole web I can't find some kind of manual how to make tcl files => .exe files on windows.
Even though it is interpeted language, I still think that there must be some kind of compilation to standalone .exe file, I hope you get me.
And also, if it would be combined with some kind of IDE with code completion, snippets and so on, it would be perfect.
But are there anything like that?

[kjir]

Well my quick search on Google told me that:
http://wiki.tcl.tk/1145

[kjir]

And as for the IDE... you can use eclipse, it has some extension for Tcl AFAIK

[kakaroto]

Hi Innocent, welcome to the forums!
Well, here's the deal!  You don't need to compile for windows since we compile everything and put it in SVN already.. if you follow the instructions here : http://amsn-project.net/wiki/SVN you will be able to use the SVN version of aMSN.. most of the time, what we suggest is :
1 - install the official release
2 - upgrade the source code to the latest source you want

If you want to know how we create our standalone .exe, have a look here : http://amsn.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/amsn/trunk/amsn/utils/windows/launcher/
You'll find the .exe launchers in there (for win95 and for winXP+). The code is really simple, all it does is a CreateProcess and it launches : wish.exe scripts/amsn
What I personally use is different, I have Tcl/Tk installed on my system (downloaded from ActiveState Tcl : http://tcl.tk ) and I created a .lnk file (a windows link file) that executes the command :
"D:\Tcl\bin\wish.exe D:\projects\amsn\amsn"
that's it...

EDIT: oh, about the IDE.. what we all use is just a text editor, I use emacs on windows, and that's more than enough for me.. I don't know if there's some IDE out there, but I don't see any need for one anyways, so...

[Daniel15]

Yeah, indeed I have noticed that it is TCL/Tk, but unfortunately in the whole web I can't find some kind of manual how to make tcl files => .exe files on windows.
Even though it is interpeted language, I still think that there must be some kind of compilation to standalone .exe file, I hope you get me.

wish.exe is the interpreter. TCL is like PHP or Perl - It's not compiled to an .exe file, it's ran via the interpreter. In aMSN's case, the aMSN EXE file just runs aMSN in the TCL interpreter. So, you don't need to "recompile" aMSN if you edit the files, just run it.

[kjir]

Not Java! Java is compiled in bytecode (which is not the same as machine language), PHP and Tcl are only interpreted, no compilation needed...

[Daniel15]

Not Java! Java is compiled in bytecode (which is not the same as machine language), PHP and Tcl are only interpreted, no compilation needed...

My bad, I actually meant to write Perl.
In any case, Java apps run via java.exe, right? Not via their own EXE. So it's still a bit relevant