Using Visual Studio

The ArcGIS Explorer SDK for .NET supports specific languages and development environments for developing customizations.

Microsoft produce a range of development environments which help you to write .NET code. ArcGIS Explorer supports customization development with all editions of Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 (SP1) and Microsoft Visual Studio 2010, including the Express editions Microsoft Visual C# Express, and Microsoft Visual Basic Express.

If you do not have Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 SP1 or Visual Studio 2010, you may wish to download and install the free Express editions, Microsoft Visual C# Express or Microsoft Visual Basic Express, which are supported by ArcGIS Explorer.

For more information on the Visual Studio development environment, see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/fx6bk1f4.aspx.

 

Development with previous versions of Microsoft Visual Studio is not supported by ESRI, as the help system and tools which are essential components of the SDK require Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 SP1 or Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 in order to be installed.

The Developing with .NET topic indicates that ArcGIS Explorer depends on the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1. This means that you can assume that the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 is installed on any machine to which you deploy your ArcGIS Explorer add-ins. When you create add-ins using the tools provided in the SDK, the add-in projects will target the Framework 3.5 SP1 by default.

You can change your add-in projects to target subsequent versions of the .NET Framework, although this is not supported by the SDK, and you will also need to separately ensure that targeted .NET Framework version installations are present on deployment machines.

The .NET Framework itself is independent of the development language used to develop with it, and there are numerous different languages that you can use to develop with .NET. Microsoft provides a number of .NET development languages and environments.

The ArcGIS Explorer SDK specifically supports the two primary .NET languages - Visual Basic .NET and Visual C# - by providing sample code, templates, and code snippets in these languages. For this reason, it is highly recommended that you use one of these languages for your ArcGIS Explorer customizations.

The ArcGIS Explorer SDK for the Microsoft .NET Framework includes the Visual Studio Tools for ArcGIS Explorer, which help you to create and test new add-in projects quickly and easily.

For more information, see Visual Studio tools for ArcGIS Explorer.

For more information on using add-ins on the development machine, and debugging add-ins with Visual Studio, see the topics Testing add-ins on a developer machine and How to debug add-ins in Visual Studio.