Better Developer Environment (BDE)

Better Developer Environment (also referred to as BDE - Bread/Better Developer/Desktop Environment) is a modern Windows shell replacement or enhancement built with .NET 9 and Avalonia UI. It provides a customizable desktop experience with its own taskbar, system tray, and window management capabilities.

Features

• Custom Taskbar: Includes a menu, task list, and system tray.
• Window Management: Integrates with WinMan and FancyWM.Layouts for advanced window tiling and management.
• System Tray Integration: Manages system tray icons and notifications.
• Shell Replacement: Can be configured to run as the primary Windows shell.
• ManagedShell: Built upon the ManagedShell library for robust Windows shell interactions.

Project Structure

• BDE.Shell.Host: The main entry point and UI host application (Avalonia UI).
• BDE.Core: Core business logic, models, and view models.
• BDE.DllImports: Native P/Invoke declarations for Windows API interactions.
• FancyWM.Layouts: Tiling layout logic (forked or integrated from FancyWM).
• ManagedShell/: A collection of libraries for shell-related functionality (AppBar, Common, Interop, ShellFolders, UI, WindowsTasks, WindowsTray).

Requirements

• Operating System: Windows 10 or later (uses Windows-specific APIs).
• Runtime: .NET 9.0 SDK
• Architecture: x64 (due to native dependencies and P/Invoke).

Getting Started

Prerequisites

Ensure you have the .NET 9.0 SDK installed.

Build

To build the project, use the .NET CLI from the root directory:

dotnet build BDE.slnx

Run

To run the application:

dotnet run --project BDE.Shell.Host\BDE.Shell.Host.csproj

Alternatively, you can open BDE.slnx in JetBrains Rider or Visual Studio 2022 and run the BDE.Shell.Host project.

Scripts

Currently, there are no custom scripts defined in the repository. Standard dotnet commands are used for all operations.

Environment Variables

The application primarily uses standard Windows environment variables (like WINDIR, APPDATA, etc.) for locating system tools and storing settings.

• Settings Path: Settings are stored in %LOCALAPPDATA%\BreadShell.

Tests

There are currently no automated tests in this repository.

License

Contributing