Getting Set up w/ Water on Windows

Water is a standalone app for Windows. We're officially supporting and testing with the latest Windows 10 releases, but Water should also run without any problems on Windows 7 and Windows 8.

Water is installed by running the appropriate "Elements with Water" installer download for Elements. This setup will install (or update in place) all required components, including the compiler, Samples, Templates and Water itself. There is no need to uninstall first when updating to a newer build.

If you are also using Elements in Visual Studio, the "with Water" installer will also update Elements within Visual Studio as well, there is no reason to run the other installer versions to update (unless you actually still need to install the Visual Studio 2015 Shell itself).

Prerequisites

Depending on what platforms you wish to develop for, Water and the Elements compiler have a few prerequisites you may need to install in order to have all the tools you need to get started with the platform.

Setup for .NET, .NET Core and Mono Development

No special setup is required for development using the classic .NET Framework (version 4.8 and below), but depending on your needs, you might want or need to install additional versions of the .NET Framework and/or the Windows SDK. Water does optionally support explicitly running/debugging apps on Windows version of Mono, if Mono 4.x or later is installed.

With the .NET Core SDK, version 2.0 or later, you can also build applications for .NET Core, the cross-platform open source next-generation version of .NET. We recommend using .NET Core 3.0 or later. Note that ".NET 5.0" and later are based on .NET Core.

Setup for Cocoa Development

A Mac running the latest Xcode is required to build Cocoa apps for Mac or iOS in Visual Studio (you will work on Windows, but Elements will communicate with your Mac in the background).

Setup for Android Development

To develop Android apps you will need to install Android SDK, which comes included with Android Studio. (If you install Android Studio, no separate JDK or Android DK install is required for Android development, as the Androids Studio installation provides both)

Setup for Java Development

You need to install the Java Development Kit (JDK) version 6 or later to develop Java apps.

Setup for Island Development

No special setup is required for Island development, per se.

You need to have Google Chrome or another Chromium-based browser installed to run and debug WebAssembly projects from within Water. To debug Linux projects, you will either need a version of Windows 10 that includes the Linux Sub-System, also known as "Bash on Windows", or connect to a Linux PC, VM or server via CrossBox over SSH.

See Also