Chess Installation Guide

  1. Official Microsoft CHESS Page
  2. Requirements
  3. Installation
  4. Test the Installation
  5. Learn how to use CHESS with a test application.
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Official Microsoft CHESS Page

Click here to go to the official CHESS page at Microsoft Research.

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Requirements

The requirements for CHESS are: Windows 2003 or later, 32 bit, x86 and Microsoft Visual Studio 2008.

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Installation

  1. Install Microsoft Visual Studio 2008.
  2. Download the MSR release here of CHESS (now with data race detection) and run the installer.

There are two command line tools that comprise CHESS. To use them, open a Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Command Line Prompt.

  1. mchess.exe
  2. wchess.exe

Look to the online documentation from the Microsoft Web Site to use these tools.

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Test the Installation

After you finish with the CHESS installer, you need to verify that the installer installed correctly. You can perform the test yourself. The steps are as follows:

  1. Unzip the Tests folder from your distribution. After you unzip, you will have the subdirectories Tests\Win32 and Tests\Managed.
  2. Open a Visual Studio 2008 Command Prompt.
  3. Test the command line tool wchess.exe.
    1. Using the Visual Studio 2008 Command Prompt, change the current working directory using the 'cd' command to change the directory to Tests\Win32.
    2. Enter in the following command: nmake all This will build the required programs, run CHESS, and record the results.
    3. To see the results, type: nmake diff
  4. Test the command line tool mchess.exe. This will be very similar to step 3.
    1. Using the Visual Studio 2008 Command Prompt, change the current working directory using the 'cd' command to change the directory to Tests\Managed.
    2. Enter in the following command: nmake all This will build the required programs, run CHESS, and record the results.
    3. To see the results, type: nmake diff
  5. Verify that the results from step 3 and step 4 are the same.
  6. Now, test the Visual Studio integration of CHESS. Open the solution: Tests\Managed\UnitTest\UnitTest.sln and select Test > Run > All Tests in Solution from the drop down menus.

If everything worked, it's installed correctly.

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Use CHESS with a test application.

To learn how to use CHESS within Visual Studio, view this tutorial using a bank example here.