Setting up Visual Studio for C++ vst building

[Dr.Dave]

I've built some plugins in C++ within Xcode but I'm now trying to set up Visual Studio.

I'm not a noob to coding plugins but I'm completely lost with setting up Visual Studio & SDK, headers, libraries etc. Basically getting to the point where I can write a plugin and test/use it.

Can someone point me in the right direction? All tutorials I can find were made 10 years ago

[Miles1981]

Actually, the process is similar to the one for XCode. If you have the plugin framework as a library in XCode, create one for Visual Studio as well. Then add the header path to the project settings (in C/C++ -> General) and the .lib in the Linker page.

[Dr.Dave]

I was given a step-by-step guide on how to set up Xcode at my uni and don't actually know how to set this up myself. So I need more instruction than that

[Zentropy]

Here's a step-by-step for setting up just the raw VST SDK in VS: http://teragonaudio.com/article/How-to- ... tudio.html

I'd honestly recommend JUCE or some other framework though, rather than just raw SDK. No sense reinventing a thousand different wheels that JUCE or whatever have already done. I tinkered with RackAFX a bit then tried JUCE and stayed there, definitely won't be going back to raw SDK. It takes about an hour to go from setting up JUCE to having a working plugin w/ GUI.

[JCJR]

Thanks zentropy for posting that link.

Though perhaps trivial for users experienced with VS, I downloaded juce and VS a few weeks ago to play around with it as a retirement hobby mostly..After a few hours got busy with other things, have yet to revisit.

Only to mention that I had older vst sdk's on my disk and downloaded the recent vst sdk version, but had never needed to get a c compiler working with vst, and knew squat aout VS.

That first step juce didn't give assistance getting vst properly installed in a fresh install of VS.

Am not complaing about anything, just shooting the breeze on the topic. Juce looks promising and fun. Am confident juce should make plugin writing easier.

It is just that, as best I could find, the juce documentation for installing vst was a terse (paraphrasing) "Do whatever you usually have to do to get vst installed in your compiler."
So am purt sure juce will be great, but it didn't make vst sdk installation any simpler.

Perhaps trivial for most users and I don't expect difficulties installing and building examples when I get back to it. Was programming C 30 years ago and I like the language.

But worked for years in a delphi shop, and wrote vst hosting but no vst plugins. Wrote plugins in other now-obsolete plugin formats in the past. Did occasional C++ along with lots of pascal, but most recently in xcode and borland c. Did a bit on VS back maybe 2005 but didn't like VS much back then.

No complaints, just conversing. Wasn't real obvious at first, not knowing VS and never having installed vst sdk for C.