I was wondering if it is possible to use opengl or directx with only visual studio installed on the system. I can not install anything else since it is a school computer I am working on.
With OpenGL it's possible. You will only need to download the OpenGL .dll's and link them to your project. There are some tutorials for that online.
You can find some tutorials on NeHe. http://nehe.gamedev.net/tutorial/lessons_01__05/22004/
EDIT:
I just read you want to use VB. It's another story then. While this edit it's not an answer on your question, I suggest using C++.
All I know is a wrapper for C#, called CsGL. http://csgl.sourceforge.net/faq.html#vsnet
Also Tao Framework: http://www.cse.ohio-state.edu/~crawfis/cse581/Homework/TaoSetup.html
Or have a look at: http://www.opengl.org/wiki/Language_bindings , at the section VB.
Does anybody knows how to program modern and fashion GUI's like this example?
modern GUI
What kind of tools should I need for developing for Windows in Visual Studio?
Thank you very much.
If you are doing this in .NET, targeting Windows, I would suggest you use WPF. Visual Studio 2010 has all the tools built in to build a GUI like that. There are loads of tutorials on how to do this, I found this one in 24 seconds.
If you would like it to be fairly platform independent, targeting Linux, OSX, Windows etc you probably would like to use Qt. Qt has a pretty good editor focused on developing in C++ using cute called Qt Creator but if you are focused on using Visual Studio there is an add-in that might help you.
Edit: There is a similar question here on stackoverflow that might help you: Creating a nice GUI in WPF
If you want to develop in win-forms I suggest using 3rd party control vendor , such as Telerik or Dev-express.
Telerik's support is very good and their win-forms controls are pretty stable around now , You could download a free trial to try it out.
http://www.telerik.com/products/winforms.aspx
http://devexpress.com/Products/NET/Controls/WinForms/
The application is simple and deals with showing images and simple image manipulation.
I know python and java, but haven't seen a sleek standalone application built in them on windows. I'm not sure how reliable py2exe is.
Going the .Net/C# seems to be the only way, which I dread, since I've never done any programming in those.
Is there another way ? I've heard about silverlight & prism. Don't know if they can access filesystems when you make a standalone application out of them.
Since you know Python maybe IronPython is an option for you? You can also use create a Swing Java app
It's a little fringe right now - but you can use the new Python tools for VS 2010
http://pytools.codeplex.com/
If you don't have VS, download the "Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Shell (Integrated) Redistributable Package" http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=8e5aa7b6-8436-43f0-b778-00c3bca733d3&displaylang=en
then you can install the python tools...
Keep in mind you'll still have to learn XAML or WinForms & it's still .net...
Hope the helps.
I am an Adobe Flex developer and I am sick of Eclipse. Is there an alternative (free) IDE for Flex? I am aware of Tofino, but I can't get that to work on my MSVS Express editions, and I don't want to buy the whole thing. Help is greatly appreciated.
If you aren't concerned with a visual designer, there is also FlashDevelop.
The current version of IntelliJIDEA 8.1.x supports Flex which is pretty nice (along with debugger for Flex). However, there are some limitations with it but with the next version it has better Flex'ing support including AIR, FlexUNIT, etc...
I personally only used IDEA a couple of time for Flex projects, I prefer TextMate for Ruby and Flex and use FlexBuilder for debugging.
Tofino not work on VS Express Edition, but is an alternative to Eclipse Flex. You don't have much more.
There is Amesthst which is a flex development that runs in Visual Studio. I did not have the best luck in using it, or stuck with eclipse as that was the tool used by the rest of my group.
http://www.sapphiresteel.com/Adobe-Flex-Development-in-Visual
Amethyst runs in the free VS Shell Edition. We released a new beta this week with a visual designer:
http://www.sapphiresteel.com/Amethyst-Beta-6-Adobe-Flex-Visual
Download here:
http://www.sapphiresteel.com/Download-Amethyst-Adobe-Flex-IDE
If you need the VS Shell download the All-in-One installer for our Ruby On Rails IDE. This includes VS Shell and you can install Amethyst into that:
http://www.sapphiresteel.com/spip?page=download
best wishes
Huw
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I started trying to play with Mono, mostly for fun at the moment. I first tried to use the Visual Studio plugin that will convert a csproj into a makefile, but there seemed to be no version available for Visual Studio 2005. I also read about the MonoDevelop IDE, which sounded nice. Unfortunately, there's no pre-fab Windows package for it. I tried to follow some instructions to build it by combining dependencies from other semi-related installs. It didn't work, but that's probably because I'm a Windows-oriented guy and can barely spell "makefile".
So, my question is this: What's the lowest-energy way to get up and running to try some Mono-based development on Windows?
I'd recommend getting VMWare Player and using the free Mono development platform image that is provided on the website.
Download Mono
Setup time for this will be minimal, and it will also allow you to get your code working in .NET and then focus on porting issues without a massive hassle of switching machines and the like. the VMWare Player tools will allow you to simply drag and drop the files over to copy them.
I'm looking to take a couple of my .NET apps and make them Mono compliant, and this is the path I'm going to take here shortly.
A year later and the answer to this has change greatly. You can now use MonoDevelop on Windows, or if you are more comfortable in Visual Studio you can use the Visual Studio Tools to write everything and then debug on in VM to make sure it is working on Linux.
#Chris I have found that Visual Studio is the best IDE for developing against .NET -- I think the best way to target Mono is really just to develop and build in Visual Studio under Windows then just run those binaries directly on Linux (or whatever other Mono platform you are using). There are free versions of Visual Studio if licensing is a concern. If you are developing under Linux, the best software is probably Eclipse with a Mono plugin (see The Mono Handbook - Eclipse for installation instructions) but keep in mind it doesn't have near the amount of features or language integration Visual Studio has.
#modesty Mono is a 3rd party open source implementation of the .NET framework which allows you to run .NET applications on platforms other than Windows.
One of the best things you can do if developing with Visual Studio for Mono is to get MoMA http://www.mono-project.com/MoMA. This will inspect any number of assemblies that you build and generate a report showing potential Mono problems (e.g., methods not implemented in the mono library). It can be run from a GUI or the command line for use in automated builds.
Miguel had a post about debugging Mono running on linux with remote debugging on Visual Studio. This may be something you want to look into... Using Visual Studio to debug Mono. There is also a new project called CloverLeaf whose goal is enabling debugging Mono on Windows in Visual Studio.
There's just no reason to build your app using Mono; the whole point of the .Net CLR is that the compiled output is cross-platform.
So you can simply build it using your favourite IDE (and if you like IDEs, Microsoft's is the best one to use) and then test it on Mono. Even if you get Mono working on Windows, it wouldn't be a very good test of your app's portability: what if your app does silly things like assuming filenames have backslashes in them, or that there's something special about a folder called Program Files? The best way to do portability testing is to actually test your app on the target platform.
And that's pretty easy to do with a Linux VMware player like the one at http://www.go-mono.com/mono-downloads/download.html.
Personally, I'm just compiling in Visual Studio 2008 as if it were for .Net 2.0 and then running in Mono (VS2008 on Windows in a VirtualBox, Mono on OSX). All the problems come up at runtime, anyway, so the system works perfectly.
I just found this very new link, which is amazing and shows you how to set up Visual Studio 2008 for Mono.
At the same time, setting up Mono on OpenSuse or Ubuntu inside a VirtualBox (Sun's product) is easy, painless, and doesn't force you to abandon whatever platform you normally live in.
This is not relevant to your question, but I might note that I just got into Mono and I'm amazed at how much of .Net is implemented, including much of the Winforms stuff.
My first instinct would be the rather unhelpful "Install Linux". You are somewhat swimming against the current to try and develop in mono under windows. Installing GTK and everything is a bit of a bother in my experience.
If you do feel like using linux, then you could Try Ubuntu
Otherwise:
There's some information here: http://www.mono-project.com/Mono:Windows and it seems the cygwin toolchain might be your best bet. I don't think you're going to be able to avoid makefiles, sadly. I found a slightly more explicit tutorial from O'Reilly.
#modesty: Mono provides the necessary software to develop and run .NET client and server applications on Linux, Solaris, Mac OS X, Windows, and Unix. Sponsored by Novell (http://www.novell.com), the Mono open source project has an active and enthusiastic contributing community and is positioned to become the leading choice for development of Linux applications. -- From the Mono site.
Eclipse plugin for Mono is dead. On Linux use MonoDevelop or X-Develop if you like good commercial support (although MonoDevelop is closing on them fast feature-wise). On Windows SharpDevelop has custom MSBuild targets for compiling the code against Mono.
As Mono and MonoDevelop are changing fast, be sure to use the latest released versions, even if they are not marked as stable yet (e.g. versions shipped with stock Ubuntu are terribly outdated).
The VMWare image is a great way to start testing Windows-developed code on Linux. Don't touch cygwin unless you are already very conformable with it.
I liked the idea of trying to use MonoDevelop mostly just to make sure my stuff would work against the Mono runtimes. I guess it would also be possible to get crazy with msbuild and write some custom targets that tried to build against Mono, but that's basically emulating the now-defunct plug-in's functionality which I assume was non-trivial to build. I do have minor experience with cygwin, and I am happy typing "configure" and "make" all day long, but when a problem occurs in that process, I'm virtually screwed. I'll probably try to play with all this again, but if it takes me more than a couple hours to come up with a way to build comfortably against the Mono runtimes, I'll probably just bail.
I will try the Eclipse idea. I use that for Java, so I might be able to get the c# stuff to work. We shall see...