Prerequisites

Version 6.1.0

In this article

Nuget packages only
Compiling the source code

This article describes the tools needed to use PDFsharp or MigraDoc.

Use NuGet packages only

If you only want to use the PDFsharp Project NuGet packages in order to use PDFsharp Library or MigraDoc Foundation in your project, nothing special has to be installed. You can compile your project using e.g. dotnet build.

To use the NuGet packages, you can use any development environment that can handle NuGet packages and targets a suitable framework like .NET 6.0 or .NET Framework 4.6.2.

We are using Visual Studio 2022. The Community edition is sufficient to build apps using the NuGet packages.

Compiling the source code

To compile the PDFsharp source code form a GitHub repository you have to install the following software.

Important

To compile and run the source code, you have to download the assets before compiling the solution.

Installation under Windows

All PDFsharp projects target either .NET 6 and also .NET Framework 4.7.2 or .NET Standard 2.0 respectively. But the source code uses selected C# features up to C#12. Therefore, it is necessary to always install the latest SDK to flawlessly compile the source code.

Development environment

If you want to use Visual Studio, we recommend installing the latest version of Visual Studio 2022. The community edition should be sufficient. Include the following SDKs before starting the installation process:

.NET Framework 4.8 SDK (recommended) or at least .NET Framework 4.7.2 SDK
.NET 6.0 SDK
.NET 8.0 SDK

If you do not install Visual Studio, manually install the SDKs listed above.
PDFsharp can be compiled without Visual Studio by calling dotnet build.

PDFsharp runs on .NET 6.0 or higher. However, we use newer C# features which do not depend on the framework. Therefore the latest version of Visual Studio should be used.

Some special sample repositories, like PDFsharp.MAUI or PDFsharp.Blazor may require the latest SDKs.

PowerShell

Install PowerShell 7.

Git

Install git if needed.

Installation under WSL2 or Linux

We at empira use Ubuntu 22.04 for testing PDFsharp. We tested it in WSL2 and in a VM.

Development environment

We recommend Visual Studio Code for development. For WSL2 install it under Windows with WSL extension. Also install the following SDKs:

.NET 6.0 SDK
.NET 8.0 SDK

We recommend to use the Microsoft redistribution. E.g. we use the SDKs for Ubuntu 22.04.

After the installation, try dotnet build for the PDFsharp and/or the PDFsharp.Samples repository. Both should compile without any warnings.

Because the solutions contain projects that cannot be executed under Linux, like WPF example projects, these projects contain the following entry:

<EnableWindowsTargeting>true</EnableWindowsTargeting>

So they are compiled under Linux, but according to Microsoft may not run properly under Windows. You should compile all Windows-only projects under Windows only if you want to use the binaries under Windows.

PowerShell

Install PowerShell 7 for Linux.

Git

Install git if needed. Git is required to build the PDFsharp library using the original solution file.