Create Mac OSX DMG files from C# on Windows?

[Samuel R. Neff]

Does anyone have a suggestion for how to create a Mac OSX .DMG file
from a C# app running on Windows? Searching online is not turning up
a lot of options.

Or is there some better alternative format? We're looking for
something like a self extracting zip for mac? Problem with a plain
zip by itself is user would have to extract all the files somewhere to
run and have relative file references resolve properly.

Thanks,

Sam

 

[Samuel R. Neff]

We're not targeting Mac entirely--only a small subset of users are on
the mac. We have an app that runs in ASP.NET on a Windows server and
would like to be able to serve up some files packaged together as a
dmg.

The spec for DMG is not available/public, so a custom writer is not
really feasible.

The only thing I've found is MagicISO which has a command line tool
that can create dmg's. However, they don't have a redistribution or
even volume license listed on their site so it may not be an option to
include that in an application.

Thanks,

Sam

 

[Pavel Minaev]

We're not targeting Mac entirely--only a small subset of users are on
the mac.  We have an app that runs in ASP.NET on a Windows server and
would like to be able to serve up some files packaged together as a
dmg.

The spec for DMG is not available/public, so a custom writer is not
really feasible.

A .dmg file is just a snapshot of an HFS+ file system, which is
extensively documented by Apple itself:

http://developer.apple.com/technotes/tn/tn1150.html

Also, the actual HFS+-related code in Mac OS X seems to be included in
Darwin (http://developer.apple.com/opensource/), which is released
under a BSD-like license, so with some effort you could probably just
lift it from there, and either port it to VC++ and do a managed
wrapper in C++/CLI, or compile it on MinGW or Cygwin and access that
via P/Invoke.

 

[Samuel R. Neff]

Thanks for the corrections and info.

Sam

A .dmg file is just a snapshot of an HFS+ file system, which is
extensively documented by Apple itself:

http://developer.apple.com/technotes/tn/tn1150.html

Also, the actual HFS+-related code in Mac OS X seems to be included in
Darwin (http://developer.apple.com/opensource/), which is released
under a BSD-like license, so with some effort you could probably just
lift it from there, and either port it to VC++ and do a managed
wrapper in C++/CLI, or compile it on MinGW or Cygwin and access that
via P/Invoke.