Skip to content

Visual Studio Code

Caution: You may be more comfortable using VSCode, but most modders use Visual Studio Community for writing mods, and Visual Studio supports more .NET configurations than VSCode currently does. It's still possible to use VSCode, but requires some setup.

Visual Studio Code (or VSCode) is a general-purpose open source IDE by Microsoft. If you are more comfortabe in VSCode and prefer to use it rather than learning a new IDE (Visual Studio, which most modders and developers use for C#/.NET projects), this page is a description on some of the differences between the two IDEs.

Reference: - https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/languages/csharp - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/tutorials/with-visual-studio-code

New Project

To match the convention that most mods use, we will create a top-level "solution" (using a .sln file) and then write our code in a source directory as a .NET classlib.

Create a new folder called SamplePlugin (can be done in VSCode or File Explorer).

Open this folder in VSCode, and open a Terminal. We will use the dotnet CLI to create the necessary solution and and cs/csproj files.

# Terminal

D:\Mods\SamplePlugin > dotnet new sln

D:\Mods\SamplePlugin > dotnet new classlib -o SamplePlugin

D:\Mods\SamplePlugin > dotnet sln add .\SamplePlugin\SamplePlugin.csproj

After running these commands, your directory should look like this:

SamplePlugin
├── SamplePlugin
│   ├── Class1.cs
│   ├── SamplePlugin.csproj
│   └── obj
└── SamplePlugin.sln

The top-level solution relates to build information for the "solution" (this project, or a group of projects) such as Debug/Release compiling or the architecture target. The .csproj file specifies information for a project such as its .NET version and its dependencies.

Adding References

Visual Studio can add references through a file chooser dialog, but VSCode doesn't have a good extension that does this (as of this writing).

The csproj file can be manually edited to add the required references to BepInEx and Risk of Rain 2 DLLs. Please take a look at this page for more details

Building

Building with VSCode

VSCode can auto-generate a "build" task for a .NET project that runs dotnet build or dotnet msbuild.

Go to Terminal > Run Build Task: - click dialog "No build task found. Configure Build Task ..." - "Create tasks.json" from template (VSCode will auto-generate a tasks.json) - Select .NET Core since this project builds via dotnet.

You can see VSCode has filled out a tasks.json file that defines a build command that calls dotnet build with some additional arguments. This build task can now be run with ctrl + shift + b every time you want to build the project.

Building Directly with dotnet

The project can be built from the command line by using the dotnet cli:

D:\Mods\SamplePlugin > dotnet restore

D:\Mods\SamplePlugin > dotnet msbuild

The build artifact will be be created under SamplePlugin/SamplePlugin/bin/Debug/netstandard2.0/SamplePlugin.dll.

When compiling for release, typically you will pass the Release parameter to msbuild:

D:\Mods\SamplePlugin > dotnet msbuild /p:Configuration=Release

The target will now be under bin/Release.

Build Events

See: Build Events page that describes workflows while using Visual Studio.

Visual Studio Code also supports tasks that can be added in .vscode/tasks.json

Copy result DLL to BepInEx directory

Create a directory in your BepInEx/plugins directory to store your plugin, e.g. SamplePlugin/.

Then add the following to your the tasks list in tasks.json for this project, adjusting paths as necessary:

        {
            "label": "deploy",
            "command": "Copy-Item",
            "type": "shell",
            "args": [
                "SamplePlugin/bin/Debug/netstandard2.0/SamplePlugin.dll",
                "D:/Program Files (x86)/Steam/steamapps/common/Risk of Rain 2/BepInEx/plugins/SamplePlugin/"
            ],
            "group": "build"
        }
Back to top