Setting up Visual Studio for Unreal Engine

If you're new to using Visual Studio with Unreal Engine, you want to read this extended version of the official guide.

Start by reading official pages.

• Setting Up Visual Studio for Unreal Engine - installation and basic setup
• UnrealVS Extension - it's a useful extension made by Epic, lets you easily add launch parameters and build many configurations at once

You gonna be a slow turtle without one of these extensions

Unreal Engine 4 codebase contains a few millions of lines of code. It's too much for clean Visual Studio to handle such enormous codebase, so nearly every programmer needs a supporting plugin.

You can choose one of these two described below. Both are paid, but definitely worth it.

• You need this to quickly find specific file or symbol (class, struct, function) defined somewhere among millions of lines of text.
• You need this to make common editing operations much faster.

Visual Assist

• Know also as VAX or "tomato". It was the only choice for programmers for a long time. Not only for Unreal Engine programmers but also for devs working on in-house engines. VAX includes exclusive features for working with Unreal Engine. It's available at WholeTomato.com. Simply learn these top features. These few shortcuts are priceless time-savers.

Resharper C++

• This is a pretty new plugin, developed by JetBrains company. Known for their excellent C# tools and continuous integration called TeamCity. They're working hard on supporting C++. Recent versions of Resharper C++ add more and more features exclusive for Unreal Engine. You'll find this plugin at JetBrains.com. And these are top features.

Smarter Macro Indenting

UE4 Smarter Macro Indenting properly handles indentation of the next line after UE4 macros. Thanks to this your code will look closer to the engine's Coding Standard and gonna be a bit easier to read.