vscode-masm

This repo includes some files for running MASM through VS Code and using Visual Studio as a debugger (but not an IDE).

Why Use This Over Visual Studio?

Visual Studio makes you jump through several hoops to run even a simple MASM program. It's definitely worth using if you were making a massive project with tens or hundreds of MASM source files and/or some complicated build procedure, but if you're just wanting to run a single simple MASM source file and debug it without setting up a whole project and dealing with Visual Studio's quirks, then this could be much easier to use. My use-case is for running simple MASM programs for a class that uses the 8th edition of "Assembly Language for x86 Processors" textbook by Kip Irvine.

The reason I still handle debugging by launching Visual Studio is because their debugger is the best one I could get working, it's user-friendly, and simply launching the debugger doesn't make the build process any harder or clutter your project with files.

Requirements

1. Go here and install Visual Studio.
2. Make sure to include a C++ workload when it asks you about which workloads you want to install. More details (and screenshots) are available at the link mentioned under their "Step 4" heading, specifically here.

If you already have those, you're done with this section.

Installation Instructions

1. Download the files in the repository's .vscode folder (masm.ps1 and tasks.json).
2. Drop them into the .vscode folder of a fresh project folder that you're using for your ASM files. If the .vscode folder doesn't exist, just create it.
3. (Optional) I recommend downloading the MASM VS Code extension for syntax highlighting.
4. (Optional) I recommend downloading the Tasks VS Code extension so the build tasks are shown in your statusbar (bottom left by default I believe) as clickable buttons.

Since the files will only be stored in the project-specific .vscode directory, it makes no changes to your global configuration. This means that it's easy to get rid of the files if you want to, but also means if you want to work on MASM programs in another directory (and thus has a different .vscode directory), you'll need to copy the files into that new .vscode directory.

Usage

1. Make sure you "installed" it to your VS Code project.
2. Just open your ASM file and run the build, build + run, or debug build tasks using the command palette or whatever keyboard shortcut(s) you've set up. The ASM file must be open when you run the task, since it targets the file you currently have open. All build outputs (exe, listing file, etc.) will be in the build subdirectory in your open workspace. You may delete that directory at any time, it contains nothing that can't be re-created.
3. Close Visual Studio after every debugging operation (I'm still trying to figure out how to re-use the same instance every time so that this won't be necessary). If it asks if you want to save some file, you can decline.