PART I: Visual Studio is your BFF (if you set it up correctly)

I'm sorry I feel so dirty using BFF (Best Friends Forever for those programmers born before 1985) in my title but it seemed like a good idea at the time and I'm yet to come up with a better alternative. Don't worry no more Generation Y lingo I promise.

I wanted to cover in detail the benefits of correct setup of your IDE (that's Integrated Development Environment for those who don't know). It's going to be covered in a couple of parts as there is quite a bit to cover, so keep an eye out for the whole series.

IDE setup is a skill that is so often forgotten to be covered by programming books and even in training courses. It seems gone are the days where as much time is spent learning the compiler as is spent learning the code. i think because it's considered the "boring part" people just want to see graphics on their screen with a click of the compile button.

Programmers just seem to take it for granted that the defaults will be fine or that what a book uses for doing little demos will be sufficient for a full on game until it's too late. I'm convinced that programmers can do it properly! (with a little bit of help)

Now obviously there are a wide choice of IDEs available with a range of different features and costs etc. I'm going to cover specifically Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 in this series of posts as it is my IDE of choice but a lot of the principles I'll cover are relevant to all IDEs it's just a matter of working out how to do it. Disclaimer: I'm not an IDE expert this covers everything I have either worked out myself or learnt the hard way so if other have tips and tricks, that I don't cover, for setting up IDEs I encourage you to leave comments.

If you haven't been lucky (or unlucky depending on your point of view) enough to use the Visual Studio suite of tools before, I think it is well worth a look and if you would like to play along with this series you can download the express versions for free here. It doesn't have all the "bells and whistles" as the full version but for free you do get quite a bit.

So get your IDE fired up and check out Part II - What is an IDE and why do I need it