To use the toolkit, an appropriate version of the Microsoft .NET Framework must be installed.

Installation on Windows

Mascot Parser C# toolkit has been built using the Microsoft .NET Framework 4.0 and tested with the .NET Framework 4.5. If not already installed, the .NET 4.5 Framework can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=30653.

You may also need to install the Microsoft Visual C++ 2015 Redistributable Package. To check if you need this:

Download and run depends.exe from http://www.dependencywalker.com/ or Dependencies program from https://github.com/lucasg/Dependencies
Open msparsercs.dll in the program.
If it reports that the dependent MSVCR140.dll and MSVCP140.dll are missing, download and install the Visual C++ 2015-2019 redistributable package.

You can download the correct files from Microsoft Download Center:

Missing file	Packages for 32-bit and 64-bit Windows
`MSCVR140.dll`, `MSCVP140.dll`	Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributable for Visual Studio 2015, 2017 and 2019 Choose `vc_redist.x64.exe` for 64-bit

Using Visual Studio

In order to access the Mascot Parser C# toolkit in a C# project in Visual Studio 2015 or later, you must add a reference to matrix_science.msparser.dll to your project. To do this, right click over your project and click on Add Reference... in the context menu. In the window that opens, select the Browse option and then browse to, and select, the matrix_science.msparser.dll file.

Using Mascot Parser in compiled programs

To use Mascot Parser, both matrix_science.msparser.dll and msparsercs.dll must be accessible by your program.

To avoid any possible conflict, it is strongly recommended that you do not install these DLLs in the system32 directory, but just put them in your application directory.

Using the C# toolkit

Reasonable proficiency in C# programming will be required. Please see Quickstart: how to open a results file and Examples for the results file module.

Compiling examples from the command line

It is possible to compile the Windows C# examples from the command line rather than creating a project. The C# compiler is called csc.exe, which you must ensure is on your system path before trying to build the example files. You can do this by opening a Developer command prompt, either from the Visual Studio->Visual Studio Tools folder of your Start menu, or you may had an entry on your Start menu for the installed .NET Framework.

For example, the following would compile config_mascotdat.cs to config_mascotdat.exe

c:\>csc.exe /r:matrix_science.msparser.dll config_mascotdat.cs

All of the examples in the example_csharp directory can all be built from the command line using the build_all.cmd command. Make sure that the C# compiler is on the system path when running build_all.cmd.