Installing Visual C plus plus

Ok getting the free Microsoft IDE to run is not the easiest task, if you don´t know what your doing. If you do though its easy peasy :D . First of all your going to need quite a bit of free Hard drive memory, about 2 gigabytes. Roughly one Gigabyte needs to be free on your windows drive (usually C:).

What I say after this can basicly be found on the microsoft page here with links included, so you might as well go there, and just check here if your having problems. You first need to install the "Visual Studio C++ 2005 Express edition" . Long name ey? Anyway there are two ways to install:

1. The online installation, where you download a small installer, which then downloads the files as you install. I advise against this, as it was always moaning about not having this or that windows update. I do run on a Windows 2000 Machine though, so maybe its no problem with XP.
2. Anyway the other (in my opinion: better) way is to download the Image file (.img), extract this with an image reader (you can get one free, just google for it). Than all you need to do is run setup/install, and presto ! You don´t need to install the frills by the way (the Visual Studio Library or the SQL something).

Okay, that was step one. Now you need to install the "Windows Platform SDK (Software Developer Kit)". Again there are two ways of installation, same as before. This time though I´d advise using the online installer, as the Image file was broken (for me anyway).

OK if you´ve got that done, your almost ready. Next you need to follow the instructions on the Windows page, manually changing some of the VS C++ 2005 Settings.

After that you need to install the vclibs package and (if you want to compile the source, and not only AI´s) the directx SDK. Also, the VC8 Project file has some outdated include and link directories that your going to have to change.