It is important to provide feedback to TFM early in the development cycle. To truly have community involvement, open-source communities generally encourage users to build the software from source, then report bugs or request new features. The process gives the user access to features before they are released into the beta or preview stage of development and testing. With this in mind, there are risks involved with building and using software from untested source code. The lowest risk is unusable software until the problem is fixed. The highest risk is a damaged installation of your operating system or other installed software on the system involved. Read the following section of text before performing the steps at the end of this article.
WARNING: Performing the steps below will enable you to build TFM from source code. This involves technical skills of an intermediate level or above. The TFM developers will in no manner be responsible socially, legally, or otherwise if you fail to understand or lack the ability to perform the steps below. The TFM developers and any associated parties will not be responsible for system failure, physical or digital damage to any system or software involved in a TFM failure. The user will in no way be compensated for loss or failure of damaged systems or software. You understand that building and running TFM from source may result in broken or incomplete features and is your responsibility. In short, you hold TFM and any associated parties harmless because of any problems, lack of features, or unusable software.
If you wish to continue, follow the steps below.
1. Download and install Visual studio community from www.visualstudio.com. Be sure to check the desktop development with dotnet feature in the installer.
2. Once installed, launch Visual studio to make sure everything is working. If you arrive at a sign-in screen, use your Microsoft account to sign in.
3. When the start screen appears, close Visual studio with ALT+F4.
4. Download GitHub desktop from https://desktop.github.com.
5. After installing GitHub desktop, follow the directions to sign into your GitHub account. Create one if you dont have one.
6. Once signed in, you need to clone the repository from GitHub (CONTROL+SHIFT+O). On the resulting screen, choose URL. The URL is https://github.com/talking-flight-monitor/talking-flight-monitor
7. Once cloned, the GitHub desktop user interface shows 3 buttons:
a. Repository name
b. Branch name
c. Last modified time
8. Make sure the branch is set to DotNet7Migration (forgive casing).
9. Press the pull (never) button just below the branch button.
10. Once the source is downloaded, you need to build it.
11. Locate the source tree at Documents/GitHub/talking-flight-monitor-net/source, or wherever you saved it.
12. Locate tfm.sln in the source subfolder and press ENTER on it.
13. When asked, open it with Visual studio 2022.
14. Once it is loaded into Visual studio, give about a minute for Visual studio to download all components for TFM.
15. Once done, press CTRL+SHIFT+B to build.
16. Once successful, you can find TFM.exe in the source/bin/debug/net7 folder. Create a desktop shortcut for tfm.exe.
17. Run TFM from source by activating the desktop icon or running tfm.exe. When there are updates to the source, you can find them in GitHub desktop under the changes tab in the main window. You can sign up for push notifications in your GitHub account. This will send an email when the source code has been updated. When you choose, repeat the process to rebuild TFM from source.