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[SpaceUrkel]

Using Visual Studio Pro as ASM IDE
by SpaceUrkel

Introduction

For quite a long time have I been searching for an ideal IDE to both build and debug
ASM applications. Being so used to a convenient environment like Visual Studio Professional
makes it hard to settle with non-commercial IDEs.
In this article I will try to show you the advantages of programming Assembly
in Visual Studio and how to get started.


Advantages

One of the many advantages of working with VS is that it comes with
absolutely everything you need except the header files (.inc).
Visual Studio comes with its own Assembly compiler (MASM), which is
normally used for inline assembly, as far as I know.
It also comes with an integrated debugger, which I am certain you are
already familiar with. No need to go around tediously downloading
everything separately and then dealing with compatibility issues of different
libraries. Maybe I am just too dumb, but I really tried getting into MASM32 and winASM and failed horribly. It sucked.
Using a IDE that is intended for C++ also makes it easy to mix your
ASM and C++ source files since they are all the same once they are compiled.


How do I get Started?

It's fairly easy to set a project up for MASM. First you go ahead and create
a generic project, I suppose any type will do as far as it is c/c++ related.
When it comes to writing down the source you will notice that there are
no .asm templates available in the normal version of VS2010, at least
there aren't any shown in the add-new-item menu. What you have todo
is just click "add-new-item", select the .txt extension, write your file name
and end it with the .asm extension: for example write "NewSourceFile.asm".
It should create your file and show a little .asm logo for your file in
the solution manager, if you did everything correctly.

Now you want to customize your project build settings so it includes the
newly created file into the building process. Right click on your project icon
in the solution manager (below the solution icon) and click "Build Customization".
In my scenario you will be confronted with two check boxes, one of which will enable MASM.

As soon as you checked that you only need todo one more thing
and that is to right click on your new source file, go to configuration properties
and make sure that:
"Exclude from Build" is set to "No" and
"Item type" is set to "Microsoft Macro Assembler" (MASM).

Now you could practically already build your project and it would compile
and link your source file/s. I wish I could tell you where to get the .inc files,
but so far I haven't been needing them myself.

I hope this helped you a little. I'll be seeing you around the net.
byebye