A minor VS 2005 nitpick
You should never complain about a freebie, right? I just got done converting our usermode Windows code to build with VS 2005. It turns out that Express Edition builds our product quite well, and the SDK has an x64 compiler in it, so other than resource editing, we’re not actually losing much by going with the free version. This is obviously a big step up in value from the VS2003 tools that consisted of essentially just a command line compiler and linker. Although, come to think of it, that’s the way I prefer to work anyway. But I digress…
One thing jumped out at me. Why on Earth is the build toolbar not on by default? It’s not on in the Standard Edition either. Furthermore, why isn’t there a (defualt) way to build just the project I’m on? We have dozens of projects in our usermode workspacesolution, and I rarely want to build the whole thing.
Anyway, I’m reallly impressed with MS for giving this thing away for free. The very best UNIX toolchain has been free for years; now the best Windows toolchain is free too. I wonder if it will have the desired effect.
May 28th, 2006 at 12:11 am
Hi, I was researching moving to VS 2005 express edition as well. However, checking the docs I noticed that microsoft disclaimed any responsibility/support from its compilers and therefore I stopped right there. Do you have any inside information as to whether the compilers are good enough?
BTW, I am currently researching using the DDK compiler combined with the SDK environment to build everything from command line. I got started since I noticedd that the DDK 64 bits compiler is identical to the SDK 64 bit compiler.
May 28th, 2006 at 9:05 am
I don’t have any official information, but yes, the compilers are built from the same codebase that the rest of them are built from. I’m totally comfortable with the code quality.
FWIW, the DDK compiler is typically slightly different from the mainline compiler, beause the OS team is very conservative about it. The 64-bit compiler my be the same for this DDK release, but I wouldn’t plan on that holding true forever.
But regardless, the MS C compiler is really very good, and I would have no trouble trusting a released version of it (even in EE) for production code. You have to QA your stuff, of course, but hey - if you trust GCC, you should *certainly* trust Express Edition, IMO.
Good luck.
May 31st, 2006 at 5:43 pm
cool site…
check this out: http://www.aspectinformation.info/ 42…
October 9th, 2006 at 11:26 pm
[…] I’ve blogged before about how much I like Visual C++ Express Edition, but it does lack one feature that I consider to be extremely important: code analysis using /analyze (i.e. PREfast). I pointed this out a while ago, and Michael Howard responded a couple of days later that the Vista PSDK compilers do support /analyze. […]