Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Introduction to Visual Studio Express
Visual Studio is an incredibly powerful IDE. In my opinion, it is one of the best out there,
and you should be very familiar with it if you have used Eclipse or IntelliJ in the past. It's
project based, meaning that you open up a single project to work on at a time and you must
specifically tell Visual Studio to include files in a project or it will be ignored. That may take
some getting used to if you come from a TextMate, Sublime Text, or VIM background.
NOTE
Before moving forward it's important to know that there are several versions of Visual
Studio. When it comes to building Windows 8 HTML5 apps you can simply use Visual
Studio Express which is the free version. It differs slightly from Visual Studio Pro and Ul-
timate which are used for screenshots in this topic. Everything I show in this topic can be
done in the free version and I will call out specific differences in the two where needed.
You can also get a free trail of Visual Studio Pro and Ultimate to follow along with the
topic's examples. Make sure you check out the BizSpark or DreamSpark programs to see
if you can qualify for free licenses of Visual Studio Pro and Ultimate.
When you open Visual Studio, you will be presented with the screen in
Figure 2-1
.
