Visual Studio 2012 Express Product Key
Shawna Erholm
A comparison between the different Visual Studio Express editions can be found at Visual Studio Express (archive.org link). The difference between Windows and Windows Desktop is that with the Windows edition you can build Windows Store Apps (using .NET, WPF/XAML) while the Windows Desktop edition allows you to write classic Windows Desktop applications. It is possible to install both products on the same machine.
For learning I would suggest Notepad and the command line. While an IDE provides significant productivity enhancements to professionals, it can be intimidating to a beginner. If you want to use an IDE nevertheless I would recommend Visual Studio Express 2013 for Windows Desktop.
Update 2015-07-27: In addition to the Express Editions, Microsoft now offers Community Editions. These are still free for individual developers, open source contributors, and small teams. There are no Web, Windows, and Windows Desktop releases anymore either; the Community Edition can be used to develop any app type. In addition, the Community Edition does support (3rd party) Add-ins. The Community Edition offers the same functionality as the commercial Professional Edition.
Visual Studio for Windows Desktop is meant to build applications using Windows Forms or Windows Presentation Foundation, these can run on Windows 8.1 on a normal desktop or on a tablet device like the Surface Pro in desktop mode (like a classic windows application).
More importantly, the 2013 versions of Visual Studio Express have all the languages that comes with the commercial versions. You can use the Windows desktop versions not only to program using Windows Forms, it is possible to write those windowed applications with any language that comes with the software, may it be C++ using the windows.h header if you want to actually learn how to create windows applications from scratch, or use Windows form to create windows in C# or visual Basic.
In the past, you had to download one version for each language or type of content. Or just download an all-in-one that still installed separate versions of the software for different languages. Now with 2013 you get all the languages needed in each content oriented version of the 2013 express.
Besides, it might be a good way to learn using notepad and the command line to write and compile, but I find that a bit tedious to use. While using an IDE might be overwhelming at first, you start small, learning how to create a project, write code, compile your code. They have gone way over their heads to ease up your day when you take it for the first time.
I had the same problem and couldn't find a solution anywhere however after some searching I managed to get it fixed. I thought I'd share what I did and I hope it works for you:Close visual studio.Run the Developer Command Prompt that came with VS2013 as administrator.Type the following command to reset user data:
I have been working primarily with OpenGL and C++ recently. Like many people I discovered the wonderful world of shaders through websites like Shadertoy created by Inigo Quilez and GLSL Sandbox created by Ricardo Cabello aka Mr Doob. These websites and other similar websites use WebGL which is based on the OpenGL ES 2.0 standard, and naturally after becoming familiar with webGL it just makes sense to keep working with openGL.
Something you notice immediately when trying to work with openGL shaders in Visual Studio is that there is no native support for openGL. Not surprising considering visual studio is a microsoft product and DirectX is microsofts graphics API. So when it comes time to deal with GLSL language it can start to look a little messy.
One way to include a GLSL shader into your program is to store it as a string or character array. Although this works perfectly fine it is not a very elegant solution, you have to either try to work on your shader code in string or char array format within visual studios text editor, or keep a separate copy of the shader in a plain text format and convert it to a string or char array every time you make a change. The other way is to keep your shader permanently in a plain text file and make a small routine in your main program code to load and compile plain text shader files. This is a relatively easy thing to do and opens up more options for editing your shader code without having to worry about keeping it wrapped up in quotation marks and manually including line breaks and other such annoying things. It also means you can edit your shader code only and not have to recompile your entire program each time, you can even implement a way to recompile just the shaders within your program while it is running.
Now that we have made the decision to keep our GLSL shaders in plain text format the next problem is that there is no formatting or syntax highlighting for plain text in visual studio. There are two main solutions to this, either using an external text editor that offers support for GLSL language or using an extension or plugin for visual studio to do the same.
But what if we want to work entirely in the visual studio environment and not have to rely on external editors? Well if you are lucky enough to have visual studio professional or better there are extensions available to enable support for various shader languages. The best example I am aware of for this is NShader created by Alexandre Mutel (another demoscener).
The first thing you want to do is give your plain text shader code files an extension which identifies them as shader code. Really these can be anything you want but some commonly used ones for GLSL which are recognised in other software are .glsl .frag .vert for example.
The next step is to go to the Tools menu in visual studio then select Options. In the options window we want to go to Text Editor then choose File Extensions. Now what you want to do is add any file extension that you wish to be associated with GLSL code. Type the name into the Extension box then select Microsoft Visual C++ as the editor to be used with those file types and hit apply.
This instantly makes your shader code much easier to read and work on but we can go a little bit further and add support for GLSL specific syntax. It is possible even in Visual Studio Express to add basic user defined syntax highlighting. I made a list of GLSL shader specific keywords to highlight, it is by no means complete or up to date since I could not find a complete list anywhere on the internet when I looked. It is in fact a compilation from several sources that I found, however it should cover the most common keywords and of course it is easy to add your own. If you do manage to improve the list then let me know!
Yes this seems to be true. Although the strange thing is when I first implemented the GLSL syntax highlighting I did not get the red squiggly lines as you can see in the screen shot I posted. However after a few days they red error lines suddenly appeared. I am not sure why this happened, after looking into the situation I cannot see how to turn off the red lines only for GLSL using the express version of Visual Studio. It seems that it can only be done with the higher versions of VS where you can actually add a full custom language support. I will continue to investigate and post my findings.
Now, I know all of you just read that title, and thought I'm retarded. Well, maybe I am, but I created a petition, trying to get a lot of signatures to get my favorite compiler for the Windows platform portable. I figured the people here would be the ones who would want it portable, so I'm posting a link to the petition here.
Yes, but it's not about source, it's about legal trademarks. I haven't read the Microsoft license for Visual Studio, but I would bet it doesn't allow meta installers (like mozilla) which is basically what our online installer is.
For opensource projects, just use MinGW. If it doesn't offer a standard windows port in the format of make -f make.w32, don't bother with MSYS. Don't bother with MinGW. Don't bother at all. Neither MSVC, MinGw, or MSYS will compile it for you.
visual studio installs all of the parts of it on the c drive except for some parts. i found a way to get almost all of vs to an external drive other than the c. you have to change some parts in the setup folder of visual studios. the file is called "
Some users use scripts very often. The scripting tool has a good highlighting and is easy to use for small scripts and changes of scripts.
For users who want to create big scripts with many classes it is better to develop in visual studio.