Visual Studio

Visual Studio 2019

Microsoft's Visual Studio (MSVC) is the recommended software to develop applications on Windows.

Visual Studio is available in different versions with both free and commercial licenses.

The free version is called Visual Studio Community and is distributed since Visual Studio Community 2015.

Visual Studio Community contains the same features as Visual Studio Professional but is limited to 5 individual users per company.

Visual Studio provides two build tools: MSBuild and CMake.

✔️

Fully featured integrated development environment (IDE) that includes IntelliSense, a powerful debugger, and performance analysis tools.
The installer is also designed with several workloads that can be installed separately.

❌

Comes with many features that are not needed for standard desktop or mobile development.
A typical installations require at least 20 GB of free space.

The latest version of Visual Studio is Visual Studio Community 2019.

When the installer starts, you can choose which workloads you need on your machine.

Each workload can be further customized, but I recommended to keep the default settings.

For game development in C++, you need at least the Desktop development with C++ workload.
Additionally, if you need to target the UWP platform, you also need the Universal Windows Platform development workload.