[Issue 20213] New: Visual D not working out of the box in Community 2019

[d-bugmail at puremagic.com]

https://issues.dlang.org/show_bug.cgi?id=20213

          Issue ID: 20213
           Summary: Visual D not working out of the box in Community 2019
           Product: D
           Version: D2
          Hardware: x86_64
                OS: Windows
            Status: NEW
          Severity: enhancement
          Priority: P1
         Component: visuald
          Assignee: nobody at puremagic.com
          Reporter: hans.adler at posteo.de

First-time installation of Visual Studio Community 2019 and Visual D 50.1 with
DMD+LDC. New projects (I tried Console apps and Windows apps) result in "Build
failed" with both compilers. I am not shown a build log and have no idea how to
get one.

This is probably something very simple, but coming from an entirely different
world (Enterprise Java with NetBeans on Linux) I am completely helpless. I'll
try another IDE for now to get into D, but thought I had better report this
usability bug.

In case it's relevant, here is the full story of what I did:

- Install Visual Studio 2019 Community.
- Install DMD with installer from Digital Mars.
  - Accept the installer's offers to also install DMC and Visual D.
    (The DMD installer installed Visual D 0.49. Maybe not ideal, given
    that automatic updates don't seem to work.)
- Start Visual Studio and create a project for the first time.
  Select a D project for a Windows GUI app.
- Be surprised about the amount of cryptic boiler plate code in the
  default app.
- Build project and get no feedback other than the words "Build failed"
  in the status line.
- Find no way to get a build log, even after a web search.
- Go to "Manage Extensions" and be told Visual D is up to date.
- Go to the Visual D website and find out this is false.
- Uninstall Visual D 0.49, delete test project, and install Visual D 0.50.1.
- Find things still don't work, even with a Console app project.
- Uninstall Visual D 0.50.1, DMD and DMC, and delete test projects.
- Install Visual D 0.50.1 again, this time with the installer that
  includes DMD and LDC.
- Find that still no new Visual D project can build out of the box.
- Double check Visual Studio actually works correctly by creating
  a .NET Windows project. It does. But I couldn't get it to show a
  raw build log, either. Just an 'Error List' after introducing a
  syntax error.

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