Asm IDE recommendations

Question

Hello

I want to learn some assembly . I installed nasm on my x86 windows machine . But I need recommendation for some IDE that i will be able to compile with my installed nasm through it , and of course that it will color the syntax . (maybe even debugger ) .

I saw that notepad++ can color syntax but it not really Enough.

Thanks for help .

Answer 1

MASM or Notepad++ works.

MASM is a bit "different" though, but a decent IDE for learning non-the-less.

Answer 2

Masm32 isn't an IDE, it's a collection of include files and macros along with the masm assembler.

RadAsm should support nasm out of the box. It's has syntax highlighting, win32 api intellisense, inbuilt resource editor and debugger and and and....

Grab it the IDE and programming pack here: http://www.oby.ro/rad%5Fasm/

Answer 3

Use visual studio 2008 with MASM to learn assembly on x86 win32. VS2008 is a professional ide that has all the standard features of a great ide (code completion, resource editor, debugging, registers view, etc.) It's great to learn with. If you don't have the money to pay for the full professional version, you can still use the free visual C++ express version I believe.

VS2008 comes with the latest and greatest version of MASM, and the build process is one click of a button (it links new .asm files in the project and .c files automatically).

To make an MASM project in visual studio 2008, create an empty new C++ project and add .asm files to the project. Then, right click on the project in the solution explorer, go to custom build rules, and check the masm rule.

To get syntax highlighting for .asm files in vs2008, you can refer to here.

Caution: Do not use masm32:

MASM32 (from http://www.masm32.com/) does not have anything to do with Microsoft or MASM as such. It is a package mostly made by an Australian known as Steve Hutchesson (aka hutch). This package contains lots of headers and example code and it uses the Microsoft ml/link binaries version 6.x from 1998 or so. It is absolutely useless for any modern x86 32-bit Windows assembly programming. Never make the mistake of mixing up MASM and MASM32. I see a lot of people making this mistake. I have even seen people give up on MASM because they thought that MASM32 was it. It is really sickening. As for the actual package itself, the example code may be useful for new ASM programmers but you should stay away from the MASM32 "library" and the outdated headers which give you parsing errors in new versions of MASM.

(from here)

EDIT: Here's a visual studio 2008 MASM project that prints "hello, world"

Answer 4

It's not an IDE, but I always used Textpad with masm, personally. (I also used with djgpp for c++ development.)

A few macros wrapping the calls to masm, and you're good to go :)

Answer 5

To have a syntax highlighting in VS2008 (assuming you don't have an Express Edition), you can try the Open Source project AsmHighlighter. This is an addin for VS2008 that supports syntax highlighting for MASM (as well as NASM...)