Well, after refusing to use an obsolete and messy language
like C++ at home for the last 31 years, I was curious enough
about the POV-Ray sources that I now soiled my private PC ;)

Given that a few hours ago I didn't even have a compiler,
I'm quite happy that I now have a self-compiled beta 25
pvengine32-sse2.exe, and it's barely 3am.

Some comments on the entire procedure:

o The README file was a bit unclear regarding Visual C++ Express,
   it led me to believe that I would be able to compile the beta
   using a plain Visual C++ Express, as long as I didn't want to
   build the editor DLLs. However, as pvengine.exe is a native
   Windows EXE, it absolutely requires the Platform SDK.

   Note that povcore does not require the Platform SDK, if it weren't
   statically linked to the EXE it should have been possible to keep
   the editor EXE and replace the core DLL.

o Resigned to install the platform SDK as well, I certainly didn't feel
   like swallowing the full 1GB, but opted for a custom installation and
   left out everything which I deemed unnecessary for my task, such as
   documentation, 64-bit tools and environments, IIS API and the likes.

   To anyone following me in these tracks: Obviously, it is of vital
   importance to install the "Microsoft Web Workshop Build Environment",
   which harbors the shlwapi.h for unfathomable reasons (containing
   things like GetDllVersion/DLLVERSIONINFO).

   My final platform SDK install was about 140MB.

o There may be some difference in default libraries included between
   the Professional version and the express editions. As far as I could
   see, the additional linker includes for the povwin project had only
   comctl32.lib set. I had to add "gdi32.lib user32.lib kernel32.lib
   advapi32.lib shell32.lib" as well to resolve my symbols. I suppose
   it wouldn't hurt to have these in the official project settings.

o The libname of VFE seems inconsistent with the others, i.e.
   vfewin-Release (SSE2).lib instead of vfewin-sse2.lib.

o The README contains some complaints about the odd configuration
   x64/SSE2. I think this is because SSE2 more logically denotes a
   hardware architecture than a build configuration. So, maybe it
   should just be "Release" or "Debug" configuration on the
   platforms "Win32", "Win32 SSE2" and "x64". Not sure how this
   works in detail, but it seems you can create new platforms as
   well as new configurations.

o My binary is about 800K smaller than the official one, but
   I suppose that is due to the openexr libs, whatever they do.

o Although I had already been running the beta25 on my system,
   starting my own executable prompted it to "migrate my 3.6
   settings" again.

Ok, off to bed now.

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