Visual Studio Code
Visual Studio Code (VS Code) is a free, lightweight, and highly extensible source code editor developed by Microsoft. It is widely used by developers for various programming languages and platforms.
We can use Microsoft Visual Studio Code with the NASM Language Support Extension to write our shellcode. It is very lightweight, meaning it doesn't take up much disk space, it runs very quickly, and it is very easy to use. We will use Visual Studio Community later to write exploit code in C, but for now Visual Studio Code suits our needs.
Download and Install
The latest version of Visual Studio Code can be found at https://code.visualstudio.com/download.
Download the x64 installer for Windows 8, 10, 11 and run it. The version being used by the author is 1.78.2. When it is installed you can start the application and you will be presented with the welcome page:
Create a folder to organise your work in and open it in Visual Studio Code.
NASM Language Support Extension
This NASM Language Support Extension provides easy syntax highlighting and diagnostics for assembly files. It will check files with the extensions .asm, .nasm, and .s. This extension was published by "doinkythederp".
Installing the NASM Language Support Extension for Visual Studio Code is also very easy. From the sidebar press the Extensions button, then search for 'NASM Language Support':
From here you can install the extension.
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