Visual Studio 2008

[InsightSoft]

What about FASM?

[ru2aqare]

What about FASM?

From my experience, FASM integrates not so well with the VS IDE. For example, VS expects a certain format of the error messages if you want to editor window to highlight the offending source code line, and FASM doesn't play well with this (I don't know how NASM performs in this field). What is worse however, in my opinion, that FASM used to give up after the first error in the source code. Which is inconvenient if you make a typo and copy-and-paste it all over your source. I don't know if more recent versions behave differently. All in all, FASM still can be used with VS (use a custom rules file to override which assembler gets invoked for the .asm extension), but expect some minor setbacks.

I learned assembly way back when TASM was the most widespread assembler, and even MASM had a 'TASM-compatible execution' option. Both of these assemblers had a fairly nice support of structures (although with a slightly different syntax), but macros were a bit tricky. FASM and NASM, in my experience, focus more on the macros and less on the structures, and since I use lots of structures but almost no macros in my bootloader and kernel (for interoperability with C), this soon became an issue, and that's why I sticked with MASM.

[pcmattman]

For example, VS expects a certain format of the error messages if you want to editor window to highlight the offending source code line, and FASM doesn't play well with this (I don't know how NASM performs in this field).

I wrote a shell script to run a Makefile and pipe the output into sed, which reformatted the error message into the format VS expects.

Of course, you'd need Cygwin with it's bin directory in your PATH, but it works.

[InsightSoft]

Im reading transversally the FASM and Im impressed! it has a very nice syntax implementation... (similar to MASM)...

huuf it has been a long week!...

[Creature]

You could always go for YASM. It's meant to support the NASM as well as the GAS syntax and it has downloadable rules for Visual Studio that readily allows you to use it in VC++.

[tantrikwizard]

VS has custom build rules that integrate quite well. Right click a project in the project explorer->Custom build rules... You can setup nearly any compiler/assembler/linker to work natively. You can create custom options dialog boxes to pass specific command line options to various tools just as you can configure the built in tools. I have custom build rules for Watcom, DigitalMars, NASM, TASM, FASM, etc. You dont need a makefile project and you dont need to use the external tools menu.