Minecraft news » Java Coding Minecraft Mods in Visual Studio?

Microsoft recently announced that, as a part of its expansion of Visual Studio into other programming languages, a developer kit for Minecraft mods was now available for Visual Studio. Specifically, it's a  Forge wrapper that allows you to use Microsoft's Visual Studio as an alternative IDE to the commonly used Eclipse, or IntelliJ. What does this mean for Minecraft mods? Let's get a few things out of the way, including rumors:

OMG MINECRAFT HAS OFFICIAL MOD SUPPORT NOW?!

• Unfortunately, no. The official Modding API has not yet been released, and this wrapper - while incredibly useful and powerful - is not the API, nor an implication of the API's existence. On a strict technicality, modding Minecraft has not ever been officially supported, though it has never been actively discouraged or forbidden either.

WAIT SO...WHAT EVEN IS THIS?

• The Minecraft Mod Developer Pack was created specifically to let people who write Minecraft mods do so inside Visual Studio, instead of popular Java IDEs like Eclipse or IDEA. For programmers more familiar with Visual Studio's layout, methods, and tools, this removes the dependency on the aforementioned IDEs to write mods for the game.

MOD API???

• This is, unfortunately, not the API, nor any implicit suggestion that it is coming via Visual Studio. Mojang is working on the Plugin API independent of this project, and it has no direct bearing on the Visual Studio Devkit.

For those a bit more programming-savvy, the devkit was meant to be a proof-of-concept that Visual Studio can now compile Java code, as part of their expansion of VS into other languages. While the kit was never meant to be tied directly to Mojang (or Minecraft itself, outside the ability to mod for it), it nonetheless provides another alternative for modders to write and compile code. If you are interested in giving it a shot, you can get the devkit by clicking here!