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Posted by Guy Lecky-Thompson May 15, 2007 |
I'll be the first to admit that I've shied away from Microsoft Visual products in the past. A first, bitter sweet, experience with Visual Basic in the late 90's, coupled with an equally uneven experience with Visual C++ 6.0 a year or so later served to irritate the power user inside.
They just seemed a bit Teletubby to me. Like when I first saw the green hills and Lego Start Bar of Windows XP...
Anyway, I thought I'd take Visual Studio Express 2005 for a spin, in it's C++ incarnation. To be honest, I thought it was about time. And it's free - which helps.
All in all, it was a good experience. Where else do you get a 100% guaranteed to work out of the box collection of tools for creating Win32 applications? For 500MB?
Yes, 500MB. It is big. You also need a couple (or 3) of downloads, totaling 150MB to get the package, service pack and Win32 platform SDK and about 2 hours of free time to get started. The actual article is over here : Microsoft Visual C++ Free Review : Download, Install, and Use the Express Edition and Runtime Libraries and will help you get that down to about an hour, depending on your internet connection speed.
For those who don't have it, it will also install the .NET 2.0 framework. If you don't want it, look elsewhere, because it is a requirement of this package.
For those who don't like Microsoft, have a look at my list of alternatives on the Free Programming Tools: Compilers for Windows 32 page.
Happy (Win32) Coding!