So I’ve been doing some .NET programming. First on Windows because I can debug it there then “Publish it” which puts all the files (compiled in release) needed, including any dlls into one folder and upload it to a VPS using WinSCP. I’ve also got a terminal session connected by Putty. I use Serilog for logging and SkiaSharp for graphics.

First bug was a missing file but it was a stupid error on my part. I had the file in a path under the home folder and had used ~ in the file’s path. You can use ~ in Bash- it means your home folder, but not in a file path in an application. Putting in the full path fixed the bug. D’oh.

Because it’s .NET (6) that I’m using, you don’t get configuration stuff the same as you did with .NET Framework. I store some config information in a file and define the path with these lines of code which work on both Linux and Windows.

 bool IsWindows => RuntimeInformation.IsOSPlatform(OSPlatform.Windows);
 var appSettingsFilePath = IsWindows ? @"c:\turfwar\twConfig.json" : "/home/user/turfwar/twConfig.json";

I like Serilog ( with project on Github at ). Nice and simple logging but flexible enough. As this application is a command line app run whenever, it’s easier to view the logs afterwards.

Why use SkiaSharp?

I was quite happy to use System.Drawing but according to this, There are issues with libgdiplus. So I thought I’d try SkiaSharp as I’m doing stuff with Flutter and Skia is the library that underpins that. This is what it takes to create a 100 x100 grey coloured Bitmap in SkiaSharp, add yellow dots and save it to disk as a .jpg. That’s what you see up above.

        internal void SaveBitMap(int id, string filename, Gang gang)
        {
            var info = new SKImageInfo(100, 100);
            using var surface = SKSurface.Create(info);
            SKCanvas myCanvas = surface.Canvas;

            // clear the canvas / fill with white
            myCanvas.DrawColor(new SKColor(0x99, 0x99, 0x99));

            // draw the dots, one for each block
            foreach (var block in Blocks)
            {
                if (block.Owner == id)
                {
                    myCanvas.DrawPoint(block.X*5/2, block.Y*5/2, SKColors.Yellow);
                }
            }

            // Now save to filename
            var mainCanvasImage = surface.Snapshot();
            var TempTIFbitmap1 = SKBitmap.Decode(mainCanvasImage.Encode());
            using (var image = SKImage.FromBitmap(TempTIFbitmap1))
            using (var data = image.Encode(SKEncodedImageFormat.Jpeg, 100))
            {
                // save the data to a stream
                using (var stream = File.OpenWrite(filename))
                {
                    data.SaveTo(stream);
                }
            }
        }

It works fine on Windows but on Linux, (Ubuntu 20.04) I hit bug #2. “System.TypeInitializationException: The type initializer for ‘SkiaSharp.SKImageInfo’ threw an exception.”. And that’s where I am at the moment.  This is similar.  I’ll keep you informed.