Hi All…
I built an app in Ionic using Sublime Text 3 back in the day, but was excited to see the announcment of Ionic templates for Visual Studio.
However, I’m pretty new to Visual Studio and also haven’t been keeping up with latest Ionic updates (for the last 6-8 months). I tried to install the Ionic template using VS 2013 Community – I’ve heard rumors that the template is not compatible with this version, but have also seen reports of success with Community. I myself got the following failure:
Do I need to install the new Cordova and Ionic frameworks via command line before creating a project? Is it going to fail anyway?
A Getting Started guide for VS would be great…
Thanks!
Marc
FYI, I solved this problem by installing the Cordova tools for VS, now working on Visual Studio 2013 Community.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=42675
One thing that kind of confuses me is that I had ANT, node, and Android SDK installed already, from using it in my Sublime environment. It seems that the Cordova tools installed a whole new set of these tools (another 5GB of space), but I don’t see duplicate copies in my drive. Are they in a VS dependency folder somewhere? Is it safe to remove the SDK etc from my AppData folder? I’d like to reclaim that 5GB of space…
Also –
Now I’m trying to figure out how I add cordova plugins from within VS. Any tips?
Thanks,
Marc
FYI - adding plugins is easy. Go to the config.xml, select a plugin, and add it. 
Looks like this post is developing into a simple “Getting Started with VS” by accident. 
is this supposed to work with VS 2015RC
FYI to anyone reading this. Adding plugins to an Ionic project in VS2013 may seem to be as easy as adding to your config.xml, but don’t be fooled. VS starts to throw crazy mad errors “require not defined”, “module not defined” – and therefore there is no emulator support for plugins, etc.
I thought upgrading to VS2015 Community would work, but it’s actually worse. Can’t even create a new project – “The project type is not supported by this installation.”
UGH.
Was super excited about Ionic dev in VS, but so far it has not materialized.
Marc
Finally got the VS2015 template working!
Turns out you can’t just do a “Typical” install of VS2015. You have to go into custom installation options and enable the Cross-Platform Mobile Development tools specific to Cordova. You can add these post-installation by firing up the VS2015 installer and selecting a custom installation. It will install only the additional components (but budget an hour of time and another 2GB of space).
If the error messages were more descriptive or if a proper tutorial had been posted, more people might have figured it out. However, hopefully this thread will be helpful to other folks out there.
Now to test with plugins and report back on whether I have any success.
1 Like
You just saved me some hair pulling moments.
