Visual Studio vst programming

[billfornow]

Hey,
i want to develop my own plug ins.i heard about visual studio and c++ language but i dont have any programming experience.its possible to load existing plugins in VS to learn that way the programming language?

[aciddose]

Sounds backwards.

C++ should take a minimum of three to six months to grasp the basics, and will take years (10+) to become proficient in.

If you want quick and dirty, start with a cheap "learn c++ in 24 hours" book. Keep in mind this means 24 one-hour sessions of one or two per day, not a single day.

After that process which should take at least a week or two, you should be able to write a basic vst plugin. You will run into issues though and it will take a lot longer to work through those.

[Keith99]

Learning C++ is a long but enjoyable journey! You will not be up to the level needed to make plugins for a while though

[mystran]

Hey,
i want to develop my own plug ins.i heard about visual studio and c++ language but i dont have any programming experience.its possible to load existing plugins in VS to learn that way the programming language?

Languages like C++ are compiled to machine code. That means that the program is written in C++ as plain-text files known as source code. You can load these into any text editor really, but editors designed for the purpose (such as the one built into Visual Studio) can provide some helpful features (syntax color, parenthesis matching, automatic indentation, symbol lookups, etc) since they understand the code to some extent.

But the "source code" is distinct from the final "binary" machine code. To translate the source code to machine code, you use a compiler. Again, there's one built into Visual Studio. The compiler reads all the source code, checks that it makes some amount of sense (no syntax errors or such) and then translates it into a form that the machine can execute, and finally writes an .EXE or .DLL file for the operating system to load.

But the key thing to realize is that there is no C++ at that point anymore. The C++ only exists before the compiler, and in general it's more or less impossible to reverse the compilation process.

So back to your original question: if you have the source code for a plugin, then yes that would be helpful for learning. You probably still want to get a proper book (not necessarily dead-tree, but those can be surprisingly helpful) on C++ though, since the language is pretty large and complicated. It's also not "safe" in any way (you have low-level access to things like memory) and it's quite easy to make mistakes that will make things crash.

What aciddose says about 10+ years for learning C++ properly is true to an extent. That doesn't really mean it takes 10 years before you can do some useful programming, but it's important to understand that it will take a while (and without previous programming experience, you probably should measure that time in years or at least months).

[MadBrain]

If you want to get a fast first try at making plugins, you should look into tools like SynthEdit and SynthMaker.

[obiwanjacobi]

Or learn C# or VB.NET and use VST.NET to make your plugins...?

Not sure how much these languages are easier than C++ but to some degree they are. The environment is also a lot less complicated (several checks prevent you from doing horrible things).

Works with the same Visual Studio...

[2c]

[MadBrain]

Or learn C# or VB.NET and use VST.NET to make your plugins...?

Not sure how much these languages are easier than C++ but to some degree they are. The environment is also a lot less complicated (several checks prevent you from doing horrible things).

Works with the same Visual Studio...

[2c]

Have you compiled working VST2 plugin .dll using one of those languages?

[obiwanjacobi]

Sure, several. Check out the samples that come with VST.NET in the code tab.