Technical FAQ

Updated 05 March 2018.

Software requirements

To obtain the source code of EwE 5 and 6, you will need the following:

• A Subversion client such as ​TortoiseSVN to get a copy of the source code from the EwE Subversion repository,
• Log-in access to SVN, which we will provide to you upon request.
• The URL to our Subversion repository is http://sources.ecopath.org/svn/Ecopath/trunk/Ecopath6

>> Show SVN step-by-step instructions

To compile and run the source code of Ecopath version 6, you require:

• Microsoft Windows Vista or newer. Per EwE version 6.6 we unfortunately no longer support Windows XP. The EwE6 user interface source only runs on Windows, as it is not ​MONO compliant.
• ​Microsoft Visual Studio 2015 community edition or newer.
• Either Microsoft Office or ​Microsoft 2016 database drivers.
• You can run EwE in 64-bit mode with 64-bit Access drivers. These can be installed alongside 32-bit Office following the instructions in ​this excellent article.

>> Show Visual Studio step-by-step instructions

To compile and run the source code of Ecopath version 5, you require:

• ​Microsoft Visual Basic 6.
• Windows XP. Visual Basic 6 does not work well on the 64 bit versions of Windows Vista and Windows 7. You can develop using Windows 7 and 8 excellent ​Hyper-V virtual PC.

Code documentation

• Documenting your code - How to write and publish in-code documentation with Visual Studio and ​SandCastle

Coding issues

We've ran into a series of limitations and oddities that we want to prevent from happening. Here are a few links that convey some of our experiences:

• Best practices, coding guidelines and user interface design guidelines
• Solving key EwE6 source code errors