Cannot use Visual Studio to install Backstage

[sand copper]

In my company we need a license to use Visual Studio Community so we prefer not to if possible. I cannot find a workaround for using Visual Studio, help is much appreciated!

[finite olive]

Can you use VS Code instead? https://code.visualstudio.com/
That's what I use, and I'm sure many others in this community do too

[sand copper]

I should probably have defined my issue with Visual Studio more precisely.
I'm in need of a licence to use Visual Studio Community because of my company, but Backstage requires it to build stating from this error if it's not installed:

gyp ERR! find VS **************************************************************
gyp ERR! find VS You need to install the latest version of Visual Studio
gyp ERR! find VS including the "Desktop development with C++" workload.
gyp ERR! find VS For more information consult the documentation at:
gyp ERR! find VS https://github.com/nodejs/node-gyp#on-windows
gyp ERR! find VS **************************************************************

[tulip totem]

You don't need Visual Studio itself. You can use the Windows SDK. Also this is not a backstage issue, rather a requirement for node-gyp which either backstage or some other dependency requires. You can see more info at https://github.com/nodejs/node-gyp/issues/629#issuecomment-138276692

[tight tundra]

I’ve found it significantly easier to run backstage in WSL rather than natively

[sand copper]

Thank you so much for this! Have you heard if this works for Windows 11 too?