For developing and debugging C# Operators we recommend setting up the development environment and running it from an IDE (Integrated Development Environment). You have two options:

If you don't have a .NET IDE installed already, download and install Microsoft Visual Studio Community Edition

• In the installer, make sure to select the features:
  • .NET Desktop Application development
  • .NET 4.7.1 (on the right side)
• Download and install .NET 6.0 SDK

Rider is an excellent IDE for developing .net applications. It's free to use for non-commercial work like TiXL and its core development team uses Rider as the primary IDE.

• Download and install Rider
• Download and .net SDK As of 2025-09-20 we use v9.0.203. But this version might have changed. Make sure to use the SDK, not the runtime.

• You might also want to download and install a git client, like git-fork. Alternatively, you can install the bare bone git scm.
• You also need to install Windows Graphics tools, although this will also installed by the TiXL releases, so it might already be installed.

You have many options.

Ideally, it would be better to sign-up. It's free and only takes a minute or so. This allows you to share your changes with the community. If not, do the following:

• We recommend using ssh
• Make sure you have an ssh-key installed correctly. GitHub has excellent documentation on this topic
• With Fork you just clone the repository

If you use a Github account, but are uncomfortable with terminals, Github provides a pretty good desktop application for that matter.

• Open the github repository and copy the link the main branch:

[email protected]:tixl3d/tixl.git

• In you git-scm, select File -> Clone Repository and paste the copied url.
• Select or create the folder, where you want to develop, e.g. <Home>\Documents\Dev\

• Open a terminal window or git bash in the folder where you want to install TiXL. The easiest way to do this is by navigating to the folder in File Explorer, then typing cmd into the address bar.
• Clone the repository:

git clone [email protected]:tixl3d/tixl.git

Note: if this operation fails, you may not have correctly configured your GitHub SSH key - see GitHub's documentation. You can also clone the repository using HTTPS instead.

1. Open the t3.sln
2. Press run - On the first start, the IDE will have to fetch all dependencies and packages which can take a minute or so.
3. The editor should start as expected.

Read next:

• Running TiXL from an IDE
• Writing c# Ops