OS. Set Up Your Coding Environment
In order to program OpenSTAAD in Visual Basic, you will need to set up a development environment.
A develop environment is typically a program that supports writing the code as well as a suite of tools to make that job easier. While computer code could be written in any plain text editor, an integrated development environment (IDE) will make the job much easier and more efficient. For this guide, you will use Microsoft Visual 2019. This is a popular IDE which is free to use with a Community license and supports many different programming languages.
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Download and install Visual Studio Community 2019 from https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/thank-you-downloading-visual-studio/?sku=Community&rel=16.
For additional details, refer to https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/install/install-visual-studio?view=vs-2019.
- When installing, select the Workload for Windows .NET desktop development. This includes the Visual Basic compiler.
Microsoft has excellent documentation on learning how to use Visual Studio 2019 here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/get-started/visual-studio-ide?view=vs-2019
Microsoft also has thorough documentation on programming in Visual Basic: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/get-started/visual-basic/?view=vs-2019