Compiling Java in Visual Studio

I often see my fellow comp. sci. students writing their (relatively) simple Java code in applications like Emacs, Nano or Eclipse. I’m not fond of either application. I much prefer Visual Studios text handling, solution overview, output windows and so forth. What most people don’t know is that you can actually extend Visual Studio to a great extent. One way to extend Visual Studio is to write plugins using .NET, but there’s a way that is much simpler (albeit also more limited). I will now show how you can make Visual Studio compile and run your Java applications all within Visual Studio itself.