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Newbie Question Regarding Visual Studio

category: code [glöplog]
 
Hey guys,

I started learning C a few months back as my first step into graphics programming and programming in general. During this time I have been using Vim and the commandline as they're quick and easy for making simple programs so I was able to just focus on learning the language instead of the nuances that often comes with using a complex IDE.

I'm about to start learning OpenGL, and figured this might be the time to check out Visual Studio, as I've heard so many good things from Cupe and many others and was wondering if anyone might be able to shed some light on how to use this enormous IDE more efficiently -- things such as, how you generally like to setup your workspace, the important or essential plugins that might be worth looking into, your workflow, or even what's worth installing or not: the workloads, individual components, too sets, etc.

I'm guessing that at the moment, the most basic install would be to just install "The Desktop Development with C++" workload, if all i'm concerned about is using c/c++ for graphics programming for native Windows?

Sorry for such a noob question - I'm kind of new to programming and completely oblivious when it comes to Visual Studio :> But would really love to give Visual Studio a shot and set up a good working environment for it as I continue my Graphics Programming journey :>

Oh, the version I downloaded is Visual Studio 2017 Community - haven't installed it yet though.
added on the 2017-07-08 16:26:55 by therue therue
having WPF or WinForms can be convenient yes, although not really necessary when using GLFW.
added on the 2017-07-08 18:01:42 by maali maali
if the idea is to start learning OpenGL / graphics programming then maybe shadertoy.com could be a good place to start. As there's quite many nice samples from people and you can do the developing in the browser. Then after toying around with shaders for a bit you could go back to tedious world of setting up c/c++ + opengl stuff by yourself. :)

Visual Studio in general is a really nice IDE. On the other hand many times you'd just need some editor for the code, so Visual Studio Code might not be a bad place to begin with unless you're interested to learn all the bells and whistles of some IDE.
added on the 2017-07-08 18:22:48 by waffle waffle
Quote:
I'm guessing that at the moment, the most basic install would be to just install "The Desktop Development with C++" workload, if all i'm concerned about is using c/c++ for graphics programming for native Windows?

Yup.
added on the 2017-07-09 14:48:59 by Gargaj Gargaj
I can recommend CLion as it is smaller and more lightweight than Visual Studio

Alternatively there's Qt, a UI library, also comes with it's own IDE that is not too bad for small-ish (like a demo) projects and it allows you to immediately add some UIcomponents to communicate with your code for e.g. finetuning.

If you want to stick with visual studio, get "Productivity powertools" as extension, google, download, open the download and it'll install itself.

Good luck, once you start working with libraries and external dependencise all kinds of hell awaits :D
I would indeed reccomend the most minimal VS install you can get that gives you a working C++ production environment. VS is stuffed full of "enterprise productivity tools" that you *really won't need* unless you are developing multiplatform WEB/mobile platforms with distributed development teams and an unreliable internationalization department in a third world country.

The thing were VS really excels at, even for the casual democoder, is it's debugger though. Learning to use that one properly saved me an incredible amount of gray hair (and I have a full beard, so lots of hair in my face that can potentially turn gray!).
added on the 2017-07-10 12:43:38 by urs urs

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