Solving the RealSense Platform Conundrum

When I develop RealSense applications, I invariably use Visual Studio and C# to write my applications. If you’ve done any RealSense development in .NET, you’re aware that they have a 32 bit and 64 bit version of their assemblies and you’ve probably had to deal with the conundrum about making your application support 64 bit or 32 bit assembly references. In most of the examples I have seen, the developers plump for adding references to only one platform – which is a real shame. With just a little bit of Visual Studio trickery, you can use target both platforms – in this post, I’m going to introduce you to a little command line tool that I wrote that sets your apps up to support x86 and x64.

Basically, what we’re going to do here is copy the relevant libs files from the Realsense SDK and copy them into a Libs folder in the solution folder. Obviously, we need to reference these files so the code will create x86 and x64 references inside our csproj files (and create the matching entries in the solution as well). As only one of the files is a .NET file, we need to copy the unmanaged DLL it relies on into the output folder as well. This last part is done by creating a post build event to copy the file over on successful completion of the build.

Using it is pretty straightforward – you’ll need to change the root folder for your RealSense installation inside the .config file. Look for the RSSDK key and enter your root directory – in my case, it’s C:\Intel\RSSDK, so when the code is running, it uses this to build up the C:\Intel\RSSDK\bin\win32 and C:\Intel\RSSDK\bin\x64 folders. So, you need to make sure you change this value to point to the directory immediately above the bin folder.

When you run the application (it’s a console application so you’re best off running it in a command window), pass in the name of the directory that you want to update to RealSense – the code looks for all solution files and csproj files from the directory you pass in – don’t worry about the nesting level of these files, the code effectively walks the tree looking for these files. So, when I wanted to add RealSense to all of the solution and project files under C:\Dev\TestRealsenseMaker, I ran the command MakeRealsense C:\Dev\TestRealsenseMaker. And that’s it. That’s all I needed to do to make my files RealSense ready. Happy coding.

• MakeRealsense.zip

Note: WordPress doesn’t like zip files, so you’ll need to rename the file from MakeRealsense.zip.doc to MakeRealsense.zip when you have downloaded it.