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Is there a decent IDE available for developing pure ASM applications (like intros) with enough flexibility to replace the linker (with Crinkler), etc.? So far I've been looking at WinAsm/MASM32, but it's not completely brilliant, no integrated debugger, very limited project setup, and I'm having trouble getting it to work with Crinkler. What do other people use?

Or, can you setup Visual Studio to compile an ASM-only project?

if you only add asm files to your visual studio project, it will only touch asm files :-)

notepad++ is really great for that but it is just the ide... i use the command prompt with it..

what nicestep said (I do so with nasm), but I make batch files to simplify it a bit.

well, yes batch files of course :) what ferris said..

Right now I'm using WinAsm as an editor with a batch file to assemble/link. It works but it sort of defeats the purpose of an IDE. ;)

macaw: But it doesn't recognise ASM files by default, and no syntax highlighting. Also it doesn't know how to compile them. I know you can add custom build stuff to do that, but I was looking for something more like an ASM project template so I don't have to spend days working it all out.

I use the command line to build it, and then visual studio to debug. You can use visual studio to debug even when you didn't use visual studio to make it. Just run from the command prompt:

\path\to\vc\vcexpress myexe.exe

It will ask you where the source files are as you need them. Of course, your compiler/linker has to store debug info in a format compatible with vs, or else you will be looking directly at the assembly output as you debug (which isn't so bad).

Correction, it does recognise ASM files, but it doesn't know what to do with them. ;)

Of course, if you're doing everything from the command line you should make one-letter batch files to do your common tasks. I use d.bat to run the program from the debugger, m.bat to do a debug-mode make, f.bat to do a final-mode make.

Weenie! ;)

Two more things I can think of:

If you use VS in that way, VS will ask you to save a .sln when you exit so that you don't have to keep telling it where the source files are. So always save that file at its default location.

Also, it might be easier to debug if you leave crinkler until the last step (or the size-optimizing part). I kind of doubt crinkler stores debug info.

is there no 'nmake project' wizard in visual studio?

Last time I did some pure assembly stuff, I used RadASM. A simple IDE specially for assembly.

I have tried this one out ->
http://www.easycode.cat/English/

There's a versionmasm32 and one for goAsm available,
supporst point&click-coding and stuff ... it's okay,
but i'd rather stick to console.

vim & makefiles. Like for any other project in whatever language.

doom: i used to work with VS 2008 Pro and working with asm files (at least masm syntax) is transparent and very easy (even for debugging). VS proposed to add automatically a custom masm task that you can modified on a per file basis (click properties on file). I found this to be much more productive than using an asm-ide. The only drawback is the highlight of the code, but there are some workaround like this.
It's also useful when you need to quickly prototype a code in C before translating it in asm, while using the same VS project.

Visual Studio 2008 is probably what you need, yep. And it's free. You can use nasm, masm or whatever. Also, what @lx pointed about mixing C/C++ and ASM.

Thinking about it, Visual studio Pro adds custom builds automatically for masm, but i have not verified if masm is fully integrated in VS express editions... (not sure it's even distributed with it?)

One more thing : i tried to work with nasm and VS, but i was not able to debug nasm generated .obj in VS... while with masm, it's easy to debug.