Continuing the discussion from What version Visual Studio 2013?:
Hi Developers, @stevebaer; @dale @DavidRutten
I have to install on a new Win10 computer and wonder if there are any IDE recommendations?
Priorities: C#, RhinoCommon, Eto, Python interfaces, Xamarin, Grasshopper…
Thanks for your ideas,
Jess
WOW its nice to see everything that well organized!
Thanks!
Indeed you have done a very nice job on these documents! With one glaring exception: you say in a couple of places in …/installing_tools_windows “At the time of this writing,…”, yet nowhere in the document do you say when that is. While this is a common failing in many McNeel documents, it is certainly contrary to commonly accepted documentation practice. I have been using Rhino and it’s documentation throughout it’s history and I have seen many documents become stale and out of date, but they hang on unrevised, sometimes for quite a while, until some major housecleaning finally updates or deletes them. Regardless of intentions when they are written, this is just a fact of life. Having the date of last revision on the document in a reasonably prominent place goes a long way toward helping the reader understand what he’s looking at while the document slowly collects dust.
Anyone with experience with documentation associated with serious, mainstream technology from professional companies will have seen the various ways this issue is handled. For example: military equipment, aviation, government regulations, mainstream software companies like IBM, HP, SGI, just to name a few.
Good point; we can definitely add some sort of last revised date information to pages if that is useful. All of the documents for that site are now hosted in a github repository with full historical information about every little change that has been made to each file. Here’s an example of the source for for one of the web pages
Well, if the user was looking at the git version, he might be able to discern what “8 days ago” means, as I suspect that changes each day. I didn’t see any absolute date anywhere, but the page was truncated on the right in my browser.
The most significant thing about the git version to me is that there must be a way to automatically capture the revision date and just put it in the specified place in the document when it is published to the web server. Is there (or could there be) anything like that?
Some documents might even benefit from change bars and revision history tables, don’t you think? And for anyone who’s really interested, there’s always the git capability, but that would require knowing about the repository and is outside the realm of the usual published document user.
That is exactly what I am trying to communicate. The web pages are generated from this source and at the time of the page generation we can use the last revised date to add some extra text to the page.
Got it. Great idea.
How about this for another idea: For the web version of the help, serve the page directly from the master git repository. Have the revision date be a hot link which, when clicked, will revert the page to the immediately preceding revision with the differences highlighted. Maybe left click shows complete page and right click shows only differences. Successive clicks work all the way back to the beginning.
Back to real life now.
Sure. This shouldn’t be too hard to do. I’ll add it to the list of TODO items.
Perhaps if the goal is to eventually have all documentation on git you could give some thought to designing a standardized page format that anyone at McNeel with a document to write could (and would) use, thus having it automatically dated when published? Even if it’s just a blank page with a standardized footnote space with the date in it.
Back on topic: Microsoft Visual Studio Community 2015 as IDE
If cross platform plug-in development is a priority then Xamarin Studio is recommended.
Hi All,
Thanks for the clear description above. Lays things out clearly. I’ve installed the vsix packages for Rhino and GH but It only installs the VB portion and not the C# templates. I’m running Visual Studio Community 2015 and VS express 2013, Windows 10. Is there anything I’m doing wrong? I tried unzipping the vsix file and placing the c# files in the appropriate folder but the template still didn’t show up.
I think I got the template working, unzipping, moving some files, and rezipping. It now appears in the proper location. But when I compile i get an error message. Any help would be appreciated! thanks
Was just following installing-tools-windows and noticed that this bit:
No longer appears to be up-to-date. Visual Studio Community 2017 displays this menu when installing:
Note that I checked Universal Windows Platform development and .NET desktop development. It’s been a while since I fiddled with this, but I assume that one will need at least these Workloads when developing for Rhino/Grasshopper?
Best,
Anders
Be sure to have .Net framework installed.I think it is not selected in your screen shot.
See this is why I try to stay clear of all this compiled business, dependency hell from the get go 
Anywho, I already had several .NET frameworks installed on my system, good catch though for the updating the installing-tools-windows guide.
2021 here,
the page has been supposedly updated in Nov’ 2020, but it’s still the old 2017 and “typical installation” story.
So I can either bloat my computer with useless stuff, or cherry pick whatever mentions C# or .NET or “framework”, hoping and paying they’ll be the right ones.
I wonder what was “updated” exactly on this page… probably only the “last modified” date…
I’m using VS2017 day and night and having no problems with VS being “old”.
RhinoCommon seems to support .NET 4.8 and that means VS2017 supports RC very well.
I don’t know if VS2019 would actually add anything to the show (but as said, I don’t know that, because I don’t bother installing it since there’s no need for it).
If I need VS2019 for other purposes I assume I just install it and off I go.
// Rolf
Rolf, that’s not the problem.
This page is supposed to help beginners, not add confusion to an already overwhelming field.
