Welcome to the A# home page!

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A# is a port of Ada to the Microsoft .NET Platform.  A# is freely distributed by the Department of Computer Science at the United States Air Force Academy as a service to the Ada community under the terms of the GNU general public license.

A# has been fully integrated into AdaGIDE, a leading open-source IDE for Ada under Windows.  A .NET port of the multi-platform open-source GUI Design tool RAPID has been completed.  Negotiations are in progress with Microsoft to include Ada in Visual Studio .NET.

Read more about the A# project in our SIGAda 2002 paper.

Features

• Extract Ada specification files directly from .NET DLLs (MSIL2Ada)
• Compile Ada programs into .NET executables (MGNAT)

Download

To use A#, you need the following:

• MS .NET Framework or Visual Studio .NET (tested with version 1.0.3705)
• MGNAT (compiles from Ada to MSIL) (28MB).  See mgnat\include folder for Ada specs for standard .NET DLLs-- these specs were generated by MSIL2Ada, below.  Unzip, then:
  1. Add mgnat\bin to your PATH
  2. Add C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v1.0.3705\ to your path (or wherever ILASM.exe is located).
  3. Add the following to your registry (modify to your unzip folder):

  • HKLM\Software\Ada Core Technologies\MGNAT\Root = "c:\mgnat"
  • HKLM\Software\Ada Core Technologies\MGNAT\Standard Libraries\DOTNET = "c:\mgnat\include"

  4. Finally, run register.bat in the DLL folder to install the Ada libraries as a .NET DLL
• MSIL2Ada (takes an MSIL file and generates a set of Ada specifications-- use ILDASM to create an MSIL file from a .NET DLL) (1.5 MB).  (You only need this if you are planning to use other .NET DLLs besides mscorlib.dll, System.dll, System.Windows.Forms.dll, and System.Drawing.dll (which are in the include folder of mgnat.zip).

MSIL2Ada was generated using AdaGOOP.

The latest version was posted 5 December 2002.

Rebuilding from sources:

To rebuild from sources, you can use the Makefile in the src subfolder.  Note that MGNAT must be compiled using GNAT 3.13p, and also that the Makefile must be run from a UNIX shell (e.g. Cygwin, at http://www.cygwin.com ).  "make install" will then copy the files.  Note that you will have to change Makefile and jMakefile to reflect your directory structure (look for "c:/d/rsrch..." and replace and also "c:\d\rsrch...").

Authors:

• Dr. Martin C. Carlisle
• Lt Col Ricky Sward
• Capt Jeff Humphries

Comments, suggestions, and bug reports are welcome. If you have a comment, suggestion or bug report, send email to: Martin.Carlisle@usafa.af.mil.  The bug report list is here.