Editing NT8 scripts in Visual Studio

[brucelevy]

Hi, what is the procedure for compiling in visual studio? In NT8 I use F5 to compile, should I be using Build in visual studio? And will this update the indicator/strategy with no additional steps?

Should I be debugging or will errors be underlined?

Thanks.

[NinjaTrader_Jesse]

Hello brucelevy,

If you are clicking the "Open project in visual studio" button from the NinjaScript editor, you would just need to save the file to trigger NinjaTraders compile. Visual studio being used in this sense is basically just a fancy text editor, it would not do any compiling.

Depending on your Visual Studio keyboard settings, pressing F5 should try and build and launch which would present an error that a library project cannot be launched. Pressing F6 should just build the solution which will check for errors in visual studio but would not be an actual NinjaTrader compile. The platform would compile shortly after you did this if any files were changed. In any case you would need to still see the NinjaScript editor to ensure there are no actual compile errors in the platform, so saving is generally the best approach.

If you are instead using the example from the addon help guide page, that is an actual visual studio solution which compiles a dll, in that case you would utilize visual studio to compile. The link lists as "Below is a complete Visual Studio project with this setup in place". This project builds a dll and moves it to the user folder, this would be for more advanced setups where you would physically build the dll yourself and distribute it without any type of platform exportation.

Please let me know if I may be of further assistance.