Compile a thrift api in C#

Evernote has an API in thrift. To use this api in C#, you need a thrift compiler for windows to compile the thrift files into C# generated code.

The thrift compiler has to be compiled itself, there is no binary download. Worse, you need Cygwin to compile the compiler.

- Download the Cygwin installer
- Click through to the list of components. Sort the list alphabetically and select all libraries that resemble the libraries needed summed up on the ThriftInstallationWin32 page of the thrift wiki.
- download the thrift source from the "Download the snapshot" link on the Apache Thrift download site.
- copy the thrift directory to a new dir c:\cygwin\data
- start cygwin, cd to /data/thrift

Do what's mentioned on the wiki page:
- enter the command "./bootstrap.sh"
- enter the command "./configure"
- cd to compiler/cpp
- enter the command "make"
- after the command finishes, there should be a thrift.exe in this directory.

For your and my future convenience, download the thrift.exe file here.

- download the thrift files to compile. In my case, the evernote zip file containing the thrift definition files at http://www.evernote.com/about/developer/api/
- find out you had better done that as your first step, because the zip file already contains the generated code files. Well, it was a nice exercise anyway.
- just to make myself believe that it was not entirely useless, compile the thrift files:
./thrift.exe --gen csharp evernote/NoteStore.thrift
(etc)

the output can be found in the subdirectory gen-csharp.