When I first started seriously working with Visual Studio one of my main concerns was all the compiler options available. I had never had this before and to see it for the first time is certainly daunting. Furthermore, there were no friendly tutorials for setting up a project with options other than maybe the first couple pages in my game development books which were always very cursory (which was fine for starting out).

I tinkered and learned more as time went on, but then there came a point when I was faced with a broken build with 456 link errors and no one on the team knew why... It came to pass that these errors were due to a mismatching of options and missing paths within the properties pages, and though I was a hero when I submitted a working version, it still took me a good number of hours to do it.

In my own opinion, saying this is a "rite of passage" is a garbage explanation for all the time lost not only by myself, but also by many others. It's not Microsoft's fault -- they have good documentation... it's just buried and geared towards those who wish to extend the IDE. So I have decided to bridge the gap by writing a tutorial that I wished I had had back when I was new to Visual Studio.

This tutorial is a tour through setting up a console application in Visual Studio .NET 2003. However, the principles will be roughly the same for a Windows application.

I wrote this tutorial primarily with the students of CSE 125: Software System Design and Implementation in mind. It is geared towards them, but should be useful to anyone starting out with VS.NET or anyone who wants to learn more about the more prominent compiler options.

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