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Visual Studio

NetIP is coded, debugged and built using Visual Studio 2022. This page is here to help you install & configure Visual Studio for NetIP.

Install Visual Studio 2022 Community​

  1. Go to the Visual Studio website. Click on "Download" , make sure to select the Community Edition.
  2. Launch the downloaded Visual Studio Installer executable.
  3. Follow the typical steps to install VS 2022, making sure to select the following items to install:
    • Workloads > Desktop & Mobile > .NET desktop development

Visual Studio doesn't highlight the NSIS scripts syntax by default. Opening .nsi script files will result into a bunch of black & white lines which is not ideal for debugging.

Fortunately, there is a VS Code NSIS plugin that can be manually installed for Visual Studio:

  1. Recommended: Close ALL the .nsi scripts tabs opened in Visual Studio.

  2. Close Visual Studio.

  3. Open a File Explorer and go to %USERPROFILE% (your Home Folder located into C:\Users\<your username>\).

    1. Go inside the .vs folder. If it doesn't exist, create it (don't forget the dot!)
    2. Go inside the Extensions folder. Again, if it doesn't exist, create it.
    3. Create a folder called nsis. The final path should look like this : C:\Users\<your username>\.vs\Extensions\nsis.

  4. Download the Source code> (not the .vsix file) of the latest Release in .zip format)

  5. Open the source code zip archive, and extract only the folders snippets and syntaxes into the folder C:\Users\<your username>\.vs\Extensions\nsis.

  6. Re-open the Visual Studio solution, open a .nsi file and the syntax should be highlighted! 🎉

note

The syntax highlighting can be a bit finicky during the first launch, especially if you didn't close all the .nsi tabs before closing Visual Studio. You may need to close all the tabs and/or restart Visual Studio again for the syntax highlighting to activate.