14 DAY TRIAL // Early adopters using the basic version of Visual Studio 11 will need to do a tad of extra tweaking in order to enable GPU debugging, according to Microsoft. There are two flavors of the Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview, one of which, the Express version, comes with some limitations.
GPU debugging is one of the things missing from Visual Studio 11 Express for the Windows Server Developer Preview.
But the software giant is providing a script available as a free download to help developers switch this functionality on.
Said script can be grabbed from the Microsoft Download Center, and executed to enable GPU debugging in Visual Studio 11 Express.
“Right-click EnableGPUDebugging.cmd and click "Run as administrator" in the context menu. Press Yes in the User Account Control dialog. Press Yes in the Registry Editor dialog that follows. Press OK in the confirmation dialog that follows,” are the company’s instructions to using the resource.
I need to emphasize that this issue is limited to Visual Studio 11 Express for the Windows Server Developer Preview. Early adopters using Visual Studio 11 Ultimate for the Windows Server Developer Preview do not need this script.
There are a number of advantages to running Visual Studio 11 Ultimate Developer Preview and not the Express version, among them, the operating systems that can be targeted.
According to Microsoft, Visual Studio 11 Express is better suited to building Metro apps for Windows 8. By contrast, Visual Studio 11 Ultimate allows devs to also create desktop and server applications for Windows Server 8 and Windows 7, in addition to the Windows 8 client and Metro projects.
“Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview spans architecture, code, test and deploy, adding support for Windows 8 Metro style applications built with HTML 5, JavaScript, C#, VB and C++,” Microsoft reveals.
Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview is available for download here. Windows 8 Developer Preview Build 8102 Milestone 3 (M3) is available for download here.