Installation
The click-through-installer will guide you through the intallation process. The installer lets you select the Visual Studio Version for which you want Visual D to be installed. It will always install for all users, not only for a single user.
To compile your application, you must have DMD or GDC installed.
Visual D does not work with any of the Express version of Visual Studio. Other than the commercial editions, the Express versions do not support loading third party extensions and add-ins.
A free alternative are the integrated Visual Studio Shell distributions, that can be downloaded here: (VS Shell 2008, VS Shell 2010) and VS Shell 2012 (see below for links). The shells are identical with the Visual Studio IDE, but stripped of any language support. It still contains the native debugger that can be used to debug D applications.
For debugging applications, you should also install cv2pdb which is now included in the Visual D installer. Please make sure, changes to Common7\Packages\Debugger\autoexp.dat do not mix with previous manual installations of cv2pdb. Visual D also installs the alternative debug engine mago that does not need cv2pdb.
Unfortunately, the Visual Studio Shells 2008 and 2010 are missing one file, that is needed for the conversion of the debug information by cv2pdb. This is msobj80.dll for VS2008 and msobj100.dll for VS2010 and must be extracted from a standard installation, the Visual C Express edition or the Windows SDK. You might also find it installed by other Microsoft products. Put this file alongside mspdbcore.dll, normally in <VS-installation-path>\Common7\IDE.
The Visual Studio Shell 2012 is installed with two packages, the isolated shell followed by the integrated package. Fortunately it has all the files needed for debugging, and the Visual D installer patches the installation to make the x64 debugger work.
Using GDC
To use GDC as the compiler to build D files, you will first have to install the MinGW environment and the GDC compiler:
- MinGW64 installer: http://tdm-gcc.tdragon.net/
- GDC binaries: https://bitbucket.org/goshawk/gdc/downloads
Add the MinGW64/bin path to your PATH environment variable or the executable path list in the "GDC Directories" option page. Then switch the "Compiler" option in the project configuration to "GDC".
To create a 64-bit executable, you will have to add a new platform to the project and solution in the configuration manager.
Known issues:
- when building a library you should change the output file name extension to ".a".
- when building a library object files will be generated into the project directory, not the intermediate directory, because there seems to be no GDC option to change the output folder for multiple files.
Debugging
cv2pdb has been extended to also convert from DWARF debug information to PDB, so it is possible to debug applications built with GDC in Visual Studio. Be sure to select the "Visual Studio" debugger in the debugger project settings. Mago cannot be used as the debug engine, it currently only supports the DMD CodeView debug format.