1.**Visual Studio** must be installed. Supported versions:
* [Visual Studio 2015](https://www.visualstudio.com/vs/older-downloads/) (Community, Professional, Enterprise). The Community version is completely free.
* [Visual Studio 2017](https://www.visualstudio.com/downloads/) (Community, Professional, Enterprise). The Community version is completely free.
2.**[CMake](https://cmake.org/)** must be installed from [the CMake download page](https://cmake.org/download/#latest) and added to your path.
* [Visual Studio 2015 Update 1](https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/news/vs2015-update1-vs.aspx) is required.
* You must select **Programming Languages | Visual C++ | Common Tools for Visual C++ 2015** while installing VS 2015 (or modify your install to include it).
### Visual Studio 2017
#### Visual Studio 2017 - 'Workloads' based install
-`build.cmd` - Will cause basic tool initialization and build the default configuration for refs, libs, and packages.
-`build-tests.cmd` - Will build and run tests for the default configuration.
For information on different configurations see [project-guidelines](../coding-guidelines/project-guidelines.md).
**Note**: Before working on individual projects or test projects you **must** run `build.cmd` from the root once before beginning that work. It is also a good idea to run `build.cmd` whenever you pull a large set of unknown changes into your branch.
Visual Studio Solution (.sln) files exist for related groups of libraries. These can be loaded to build, debug and test inside
the Visual Studio IDE.
Note that when calling the script `build.cmd` attempts to build both the native and managed code.
Only use it when the parameters that you are passing to the script apply for both components. Otherwise, use the scripts `build-native.cmd` and `build-managed.cmd` respectively.
For more information about the different options when building, run `build.cmd -?` and look at examples in the [developer-guide](../project-docs/developer-guide.md).
For more details, or to test an individual project, see the [developer guide topic](https://github.com/dotnet/corefx/blob/master/Documentation/project-docs/developer-guide.md).
Once you've built the source code for netfx from the root (`build.cmd -framework:netfx`) follow these steps:
1. Build test project with the following parameters `msbuild /t:buildandtest /p:targetgroup=netfx /p:testdebugger=devenv.exe`. This will open Visual Studio with the runner as startup project and its corresponding arguments.
2. Open project properties and fill in the next information:
* Debugger Type -> Managed (v4.6, v4.5, v4.0)
* Environment -> you need to add an environment variable as follows:
For advanced debugging using WinDBG see [Debugging CoreFX on Windows](https://github.com/dotnet/corefx/blob/master/Documentation/debugging/windows-instructions.md)
* Running tests from using the VS test explorer does not currently work after we switched to running on CoreCLR. [We will be working on enabling full VS test integration](https://github.com/dotnet/corefx/issues/1318) but we don't have an ETA yet. In the meantime, use the steps above to launch/debug the tests using the console runner.
* VS 2015 is required to debug tests running on CoreCLR as the CoreCLR
debug engine is a VS 2015 component.
* If the Xamarin PCL profiles are installed, the build will fail due to [issue #449](https://github.com/dotnet/corefx/issues/449). A possible workaround is listed [in the issue](https://github.com/dotnet/corefx/issues/449#issuecomment-95117040) itself.
