How to Build the Brackets App Shell on Windows

For most of your work on Brackets, you should only need to edit the HTML/JS/CSS code in the brackets repo. But if you need to do work on the native app shell in brackets-app, here's how. (These instructions are for Windows; Mac instructions are [here] (https://github.com/adobe/brackets-app/wiki/How-to-Build-the-Brackets-App-Shell-on-Mac).)

Building the app shell

To build the application shell code, load src/win/Brackets.sln into Visual C++ 2010 (or newer). You can use the free Visual C++ Express 2010, but you will get a warning that the 'x64' platform cannot be found. This warning can be ignored.

Build all targets and select the Brackets project for running or debugging.

Adding Native Code to Brackets

Brackets uses V8 extensions to bridge between JavaScript and native code. This code lives in:

• src/win/cefclient/res/brackets_extensions.js This is the JavaScript side of the bridge. Native functions are noted with the "native" keyword.
• src/win/cefclient/brackets_extensions.cpp (and .h) This is the native side of the bridge. The Execute() method in the BracketsExtensionHandler class is the bottleneck that all calls go through.