32 bit VST which Visual Studio

Of complicated reasons I need to build a VST3 plugin in 32 bit for Windows. Will that work with latest Visual Studio 2022?

I have not built anything on PC until now, but am an advanced beginner on Juce for Mac/Xcode so I’m asking in hope I start with the right prerequisites.

I use the free VS 2022 Community edition and it has the 32 bit options.
It, 2019 and previous are free. Careful NOT to tick every option when installing, you only need the c++ stuff. You don’t need all the bloat - anything else can be added later when needed.

edit. I’ve not made 32 bit from 2022 yet, but the option in the projucer works and carries over properly.

Thanks, I guess I’ll go for the 2022 then. I will avoid the bloat, thanks for the advice.

Just a thought, you’ll also want the Windows 10 SDK, which they say works with 11 and all the previous Windows.
The SDK is not embedded in Visual Studio as you’d expect, so you can have different versions of VS installed at the same time.

Hi again. I’m not sure I understand what you mean by “Windows 10 SDK”, but I actually installed Visual Studio 2022 and managed to compile a test-project in 32-bit and it worked on the (very old fashioned) target platform so all is well. :smiley:

One thing that puzzles me though, I’m not used to Visual Studio, was “Configuration Manager” menu. After the compilation I opened it and saw this (see image). So I thought I did it the wrong way and selected “Win32” as active solution platform instead and then recompiled. But compiler said something like “up to date, nothing to compile”. So it seems “active solution platform” doesn’t matter. So what’s it for?

With the 10 SDK, I was just being safe as I know it works here.
It appears the configuration manager only allows you to select the 32/64 bit options with a new project. For some reason a project launched from Projucer doesn’t give the option. You now have to select 64 bit from the Producer to get 64 bit compilation. ( It’s annoying, almost as if Juce is an Apple only project sometimes. :grin: They really should allow both 32 and 64 to be selected.)

To be fair though, you can ‘add new’ though, and put in your own configuration -under the label ‘platform’ in your screenshot. Apparently you can also add ARM, which surprised me a little.