1. Well, first things first, that's awesome.

2. After having to clear 5 Gigs from my hard drive for MSVC 2015, I can't seem to find Empty Project {"name":"609972","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/a\/0\/a0f5e9d723fbd0a0a8ed4f0cc2d85797.png","w":1100,"h":800,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/a\/0\/a0f5e9d723fbd0a0a8ed4f0cc2d85797"}

3. How does one go about getting a package on NuGet? Is it a lot of work?

I do not like Windows, but I really like this news. Peter Hull gets an extra big Christmas bonus this year.

That's really fantastic. Very well done, Peter!

FYI, I've found NuGet to be more trouble than its worth in professional work. We use it to manage several packages from .NET libraries and frameworks to JavaScript libraries. It's generally quite a mess. And we haven't figured out the right incantation to mix it with version control... This is literally a Windows-style package manager... It lacks many of the things that make package repositories Just Work(tm). It's generally a poor way to pull in JavaScript library updates. For Allegro's purposes I think it will solve the problem quite nicely!

I think SL is being modest, as usual. He knocked all the rough edges off my package definition and made it usable.

Couple of points:

• Unlike Linux where the packaging is fundamental to the concept of a 'Linux Distribution', Nuget feels a bit of an afterthought. I have a horrible feeling MS is not 100% behind it though it does seem to be gaining popularity at the moment.

• It seems to handle different tool sets and platforms by just including all possible variants in the same package - one for each version of Visual Studio times each debug/release variant times each processor. This makes for big packages which AFAICS are copied in their entirety into each project that uses them.

• The docs are a bit sketchy so anything I say above may be wrong!

Thanks all,
Pete

I tried it, works well. Should be really helpful to get people into allegro development easier on windows.

How do the Allegro packages/versions get updated?

I have tried out creating a few projects using NuGet.

I get an access violation (Exception thrown at 0x00000000 in test.exe: 0xC0000005: Access violation executing location 0x00000000.), when I put this code in main():

al_init();
al_init_image_addon();
al_set_physfs_file_interface();
al_load_bitmap("data/tiles.png");

When I comment out al_set_physfs_file_interface(), I get no access violation.

Is this a bug or some setting I must do in my project because I'm using NuGet?

You never called PHYSFS_init.

The "allegro-debug.pdb" symbol file is missing and/or not deployed with the NuGet package so when a program crashes it's impossible to trace them back to figure out what was passed to Allegro's functions to figure out what was wrong.

Be careful about distributing PDBs - they include absolute path information (to help MSVC locate the original source files).

And yes, they do tend to be huge.

So, to do this we just have to correctly name the package (Allegro.symbols.nupkg) and the NuGet/VS system will automatically make the link?
(Based on https://docs.nuget.org/create/creating-and-publishing-a-symbol-package)

For completeness, here's the exact error after the program attempts to return from main:

"Exception thrown at 0x577E3E67 (allegro-debug-5.1.dll) in Engine.exe: 0xC0000005: Access violation reading location 0x00000000."

When I select "Break" from the available buttons I get:

"No Symbols Loaded (tab name)
allegro-debug.pdb not loaded (title)

allegro--debug.pdb contains the debug information required to find the source for the module allegro-debug-5.1.dll

Module Information
Version: [blank]
Original Location: [Path to Output folder for Debug Configuration]\allegro-debug-5.1.dll"

It's obvious that a heap-allocated variable has gone out of scope and cleaned itself up (I'm using C++11 smart pointers) and then Allegro tried to do some cleanup with it but without a Call Stack or symbols available I have no idea which variable went out of scope nor which function tried to access it.

EDIT

After deleting the output folders and rebuilding to make sure I have the correct DLLs loaded (I still had a few of the 5.0.10 DLLs in them, now they are all 5.1) I still get the same error.