Path: chuka.playstation.co.uk!tjs From: tjs@cs.monash.edu.au (Toby Sargeant) Newsgroups: scee.yaroze.freetalk.english Subject: Re: Visual Studio/C++ Date: 21 Sep 1999 21:49:26 GMT Organization: PlayStation Net Yaroze (SCEE) Lines: 49 Message-ID: References: <37e7cfcd.18742521@www.netyaroze-europe.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: longford.cs.monash.edu.au X-Newsreader: slrn (0.9.4.3 UNIX) On Tue, 21 Sep 1999 18:39:20 GMT, Nick Ferguson wrote: >Hi all, > >I've been learning C++ in my spare time recently, and I am looking for >a freebie version of Microsoft Visual C++ such as might have graced >the cover of a magazine of similar. I could probably get the full >version of Visual C++ 6 for about 70 quid as a student, but an upgrade >from 4 or 5 might be cheaper... I'd also like it for fooling with the >MathEngine SDK, which I got proper documentation for and looks quite >simple to use. Yay! I plan on looking into Visual Basic and J++ too, >so I might be better off getting the Visual Studio package. Hmm... any >ideas on how to do this cheaply and legally? Visual Studio is wildly overpriced. If you want to be able to say that you've had experience with Visual Studio, then I guess you have no way of avoiding that cost. If, however, you want to be able to say that you've had C++ experience, which is really all that _should_ count (familiarity with an IDE is something you can pick up easily, and IMHO, the Visual Studio editor _bites_), then you soulh look at picking up the win32 port of the latest g++ (or egcs, if it's been ported yet). Apart from being free, it's also one of the better compilers for adhering to the ANSI standard, it's command line based, which is a bonus (at least to some of us), it has a real version of make, and it's a lot more similar to yaroze/unix development than using VC++ is. The MathEngine SDK should compile using any C++ compiler, and if it doesn't, then the changes you need to make should be reasonably trivial. With a bit of work, you should even be able to use DirectX with g++ (or find some information about how to do it, at least). If you're thinking of learning VB, I'd suggest that you look at Perl or Python first. They cover the same kind of ground as VB, but are portable between windows and unix, are also free, and probably won't ruin you as a programmer (Jury's out on whether Perl is toxic in large doses). As for java, if you don't care about speed, you can download Sun's win32 port of their reference JDK for free as well. If all you're doing is writing applets, then all you need is a compiler; you can use netscape or IE to run the compiled code. I got a free MS Java Virtual Machine implementation with my laptop (in fact I got 2 cds). I promptly installed linux on it, so I have no idea what's on the CD, but that might give you something to run generic java code on. Basically, the bottom line is that if you don't feel a need to have a sexy IDE (although python has a free one), then there are heaps of free tools that will do what you want, even on windows platforms. Toby.