Working with Elements in Visual Studio
Developers working on Windows can also use Elements within Microsoft's Visual Studio IDE.
Elements can integrate with Visual Studio 2017, 2019 and 2022 for Windows, Community, Professional and Higher. The Community Edition is a free download available from Microsoft at visualstudio.microsoft.com/downloads.
From inside the Visual Studio IDE, you can develop, deploy and debug on all the platforms supported by Elements. When targeting the Mac and iOS platforms, Elements inside Visual Studio will communicate with tools on the Mac, as necessary, using a small utility called CrossBox.
In general, working with Elements inside Visual Studio behaves the same as working with Microsoft's languages and platforms. Please refer to Microsoft's documentation for Visual Studio.
There are a few additional topics for Elements-specific areas of Visual Studio:
- Templates for creating new Projects and Files
- Project Switcher helps working with files shared between platforms
- Working with the Visual Designers – those in Visual Studio, as well as Xcode or Android Studio
- The Options Dialog lets you configure IDE options
You might also want to refer to these topics from other sections of the documentation:
- Oxidizer – Converting C#, Java, Objective-C and Delphi code
- Connecting to a CrossBox Server – to work with Mac, iOS or Linux
- EBuild in Visual Studio
Prerequisites / Getting Set Up
Depending on what platforms you wish to develop for, the Elements compiler and Visual Studio have a few prerequisites you may need to install in order to have all the tools you need to get started with the platform.
See Also
- Download Visual Studio from Microsoft
- Visual Studio 2015 Documentation from Microsoft
- Visual Studio 2017 Documentation from Microsoft