Develop Maya tools using Visual Studio

[Anonymous]

Greetings,

I have seen one can develop custom Maya tools using Python or MEL. However, scripting without intellisense is a wee bit rough for me. I would like to know if there is room for developing Maya tools in Python (or c# maybe)  using Visual Studio?

Thanks in advance.

[techvd]

Yes, you can develop Maya tools using any type of IDE tools including Visual Studio. MEL is still probably easier to code right in Maya but Python tools can certainly be used in Visual Studio. You'll probably need to make sure all the relevant Python modules are properly configured in Visual Studio for Intellisense to work correctly.

[Anonymous]

I have asked that a couple of month ago: fully working IntelliSense with Maya API 2.0 in visual studio. In short form, it does not 100% work within visual studio. The old API does function while the API 2.0 does have some problems with visual studio. If you getting starting with the API it is really annoying but as soon as you know all functions its - ok. It is always good to open a window in your browser and open: Maya 2017 Python API 2.0 Class Documentation. There you can easily check the definitions of all methods.

Regards,

Life

[Anonymous]

Thanks for taking the time to answer my question.

I would like to ask then that how to set up visual studio for a task like this?

I tried googling it, this may have been my bad, but I didn't find anything that would guide me through it.

Are some sources out there that tell me this? And will I be able to actually debug my code? I have never used maya's scripting toolkit, except for some makeIdentity, I will more than probably cause some errors that will have to be debugged.

Regards

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

"I have asked that a couple of months ago: fully working IntelliSense with Maya API 2.0 in visual studio."

If you click on that link you will see my accepted answer. It explains how you can setup visual studio with Maya's python.

Well debugging ... The only way I find to debug was to use the print function. Also annoying: I always have to copy (strg-a) (strg-c) my script into the Maya's script editor because there isn't a "connection" between visual studio and Maya. There is a plugin for visual studio ToMaya but I find it easier to do it like I did because often I need to select something in the viewport.

Regards,

Life