[#Preface]
["preface",id="Preface"]
== Preface

[#PreForeword]

=== Foreword

This book tries to give you a guide to start your own experiments into
the wonderful world of Wireshark development.

Developers who are new to Wireshark often have a hard time getting their development environment up and running.
This is especially true for Windows developers, as a lot of the tools and methods used when building Wireshark are much more common in the UNIX world than on Windows.

The first part of this book will describe how to set up the environment
needed to develop Wireshark.

The second part of this book will describe how to change the Wireshark
source code.

We hope that you find this book useful, and look forward to your comments.

[#PreAudience]

=== Who should read this document?

The intended audience of this book is anyone going into the development of
Wireshark.

This book is not intended to explain the usage of Wireshark in general.
Please refer the
{wireshark-users-guide-url}[Wireshark User’s Guide] about Wireshark usage.

By reading this book, you will learn how to develop Wireshark. It will
hopefully guide you around some common problems that frequently appear for
new (and sometimes even advanced) developers of Wireshark.

[#PreAck]

=== Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the whole Wireshark team for their
assistance. In particular, the authors would like to thank:

* Gerald Combs, for initiating the Wireshark project.

* Guy Harris, for many helpful hints and his effort in maintaining
the various contributions on the mailing lists.

* Frank Singleton from whose `README.idl2wrs` <<ChDissectIdl2wrs>> is derived.

The authors would also like to thank the following people for their
helpful feedback on this document:

* XXX - Please give feedback :-)

And of course a big thank you to the many, many contributors of the
Wireshark development community!

[#PreAbout]

=== About this document

This book was developed by mailto:{wsdg-author-email}[Ulf Lamping],
updated for VS2013 by mailto:{wsdg-author-email2}[Graham Bloice],
and updated for later versions of Visual Studio by various contributors.

It is written in AsciiDoc.

[#PreDownload]

=== Where to get the latest copy of this document?

The latest copy of this documentation can always be found at
{wireshark-developers-guide-url}.

[#PreFeedback]

=== Providing feedback about this document

Should you have any feedback about this document, please send it to the
authors through mailto:{wireshark-dev-list-email}[].


