Microsoft’s Visual Studio development environment is a popular development environment, commonly used by the corporate IT groups of large pharmaceutical companies. Microsoft Visual Studio provides an integrated development environment (IDE) for several programming languages including C, C++, C#, J# and Microsoft Visual Basic that can be used to target graphical and console applications to Intel (and AMD) compatible systems running Microsoft Windows.

This document describes how to integrate OpenEye Scientific Software’s toolkit libraries into Visual Studio applications, for example using Microsoft Windows Forms designer, to deliver the power of OEChem’s chemistry functionality to utilities on a chemist’s desktop.

Microsoft Versions
One potentially problematic aspect of using Microsoft’s development tools to build, debug and deploy is their rapid and continual rate of change. As Microsoft’s Windows operating systems evolve, so do their developer tools to support new functionality, simplified development and ever changing programming paradigms. This means that with each release the user interface of their IDE, the APIs of their libraries and components and even the syntax and names of their programming languages typically change, often in backwardly incompatible ways. The majority of this document describes the use of Microsoft Visual C++ .Net 2003 to develop “managed” Windows Forms applications on Windows 2000 and higher. Although, the steps and code examples given below are known not to work with earlier versions and probably won’t work without modification on later versions, the explanations given in this document should be sufficient for someone skilled/familiar with Microsoft’s tools to adapt to their particular development environment.

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