Installation

Introduction

The C#/.Net version of the OpenEye Toolkits is a P/Invoke wrapper created using SWIG. It is important to note that this is not a new version of the toolkits written in C# nor is it a C# interpretation of the toolkit API, but a rather faithful reproduction of the toolkit API in C#. And while this manual is specific to C#, the version of the toolkits works with all .Net languages include Visual Basic .Net, F# and IronPython.

A few of the idiomatic differences include:

  • There are relatively few classes in OEChem and they have a rather shallow inheritance hierarchy.

  • Most OEChem algorithms are in C++ free functions. These are mapped to static methods in the class OEChem.

  • C# doesn’t support all the operator overloading of C++, so some C++ operators are mapped to methods. For example, “operator bool()” is mapped to a member function called “IsValid()”, “operator()” is mapped to “Call()”.

Prerequisites

In order to use the OpenEye toolkits with C#/.Net, you need a copy of Visual Studio. We currently support VS2017, VS2019, and VS2022 including the free “Express” versions.

Note

VS2022 requires the .NET Framework 4.8. We do not yet support .NET Core.

GPU Prerequisites

Note

GPU-Enabled OpenEye products are not supported on Windows platforms or in the C# language.

Download the OpenEye .Net distribution

The distribution is obtained from http://www.eyesopen.com/downloads. There is a 64-bit download for each supported version of Visual Studio.

Installation

Each distribution is provided as ZIP file, that you can simply extract. Inside the C#-Examples folder, you will find a pair of folders for each toolkit. One for the main examples and one for the documentation examples. Each sub-folder contains a solution (.sln) file appropriate for your chosen Visual Studio version.

The Global Assembly Cache

If you desire to install all the OpenEye assemblies into the Global Assembly Cache, there is a convenience script included in the Scripts directory. Double-click on Install_to_GAC.bat to install all the assemblies.

If you need to uninstall the assemblies for some reason, simply double-click on Uninstall_from_GAC.bat.

Note

There is no requirement to install anything into the GAC. If you are not sure you need this, you probably don’t.