Rob Henry - 2010-05-11

I used asmHighlighter 1.3  with MASM versions 8, 9 & 10 and the advanced SSE instructions do not highlight or assemble within Visual Studio 2005, 2008 or 2010, but I am thrilled to say that JWASM version 2.02, released 01/19/2010, while it also doesn't highlight all the SSE instructions, it does assemble all the instructions through SSE 4.2!

Yeah!

JWASM is an excellent direct replacement for MASM. I directly replaced MASM v9 from Visual Studio 2008 with JWASM 2.02 by simply installing JWASM and changing the Visual Studio Custom Build Rules to use JASM and not MASM, changing the project setting of JWASM to use the include directories I was using with MASM, and everything assembled perfectly, and this was for an embedded avionics package that is no lightweight product. This took only 15 minutes.

I then installed asmHighlighter 1.3, crossed my fingers, and re-built all the projects. It worked! No failure to assemble the SSE 4.2 instructions as with MASM! The highlighting worked, outside of those few SSE instructions that don't highlight yet, but no failures to build.

This is huge for me as I really love the highlighting asmHighlighter does for assembly language files, but with MASM I had to uninstall asmHighlighter as MASM wouldn't assemble the latest SSE instructions with it installed. MASM fails to assemble all SSE instruction but JWASM does not.

I highly recommend both JWASM 2.02 and asmHighlighter 1.3 as a fantastic combination for assembly language programming within Visual Studio. Did I mention I was thrilled?!

I'll post this on the asmHighlighter board as well.