Setting up SDK in Visual Studio

bshugs@hotmail.com

Good Morning.  I've been going through the forum for a few hours now trying to get a handle on how to set up Visual Studio (any version) to work on plug-ins.  It has been a very ... frustrating ... few hours.  There are is an open source plug-in that I'd like to see about tweaking to serve my purpose.  Everything I've seen (I'll list some below) tell me to download the samples (done) and open the .sln file (no longer there.  There's a Makefile instead).  Others say read the docs, got those and read through them.  Decent info and layout, but nothing I can find says anything about setting up the IDE.

I tried grabbing the code from github for the plug-in I want to work on, but of course there are a mess of errors.  I made sure I have the SDK downloaded.  I made sure I have the C++ libraries for Visual Studio installed.  I installed Visual Studio 2017.  I'm running out of ideas and a search of Daz Forums, Google, and YouTube are turning up nothing.

I'm not a professional programmer.  I'm also not a professional artist.  I'm an amateur at both with a background in C/Pascal and C#, though I haven't used the first two in decades.

So my question is:  Is there anything out there that will tell a person, not how to write a plug-in or code in C++, but just how to set up the IDE with the libraries where they need to be to even open and compile an existing plug-in?  If there's not ... if this is something people have to struggle thorugh .. let me know that and I'll abandon any plans and stick with scripting.

Thank you in advance for any info.

 

Here are some of the threads I've checked so far:

https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/78686/how-to-open-sdk-file

https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/362081/how-do-i-start

https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/4236/ds4-5-plugin-sdk-getting-started

https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/52836/afirstplugin-example-problem#latest

https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/272706/just-getting-into-the-sdk-confused-already#latest

https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/61259/tutorial-creating-a-first-plugin-daz3d

https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/66076/best-method-for-making-plugins

https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/421006/where-to-begin

Dobit

Make sure you have the latest version of the SDK installed. Open the "DAZ Studio SDK Documentation" from the "docs" directory of the SDK installation. Here you will find the chapter "Compiling on Windows", which describes the necessary steps quite well.

geradok

... or even more convenient, try this path inside DAZ Studio SDK: file:///{your path to}/DAZStudio4.5+%20SDK/docs/index.html

There you find a menu with all information you need including the "Compiling on Windows" item which is in fact a detailed step-by-step description.

Happy Coding!

bshugs@hotmail.com

Sorry for the slow reply.  Thanks for all the feedback.  I'll be going though things now that work has settled down a bit.