Mike Raiford <mra### [at] hotmailcom> wrote:
> Anybody played with them. I realize there are relatively few on here who 
> actually like MS products, but I want to hear other peoples opinions of 
> MS's free versions of their dev tools.

  I have used it and it seems ok.

  Perhaps a bit strangely at least the express version is not a
"download, install, use" package. Besides downloading and installing
the express version, you have to separately download and install the
Windows Platform SDK and manually configure VS to use it (there doesn't
seem to be any way to make it automatically detect that you have the SDK
installed and to use it properly). If you do anything that needs DirectX,
you need to download and install the DirectX SDK and manually configure
VS to use it (again, it doesn't seem to detect this automatically). All
this can be a real pain, especially since it doesn't seem to be documented
anywhere. Without precise instructions on how to do this, it can be next
to impossible to figure it out.
  (I have only experience with VS 2005 Express. I don't know if they
have improved this with VS 2008.)

  Once you have succeeded in installing and configuring everything,
it seem to work ok, though.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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