Don't have a huge amount to say today - think I exhausted my typing with yesterdays mammoth entry [grin]
Anyway, whilst looking around the forums I came across a few links to some Microsoft software that you can download that's quite useful...
My machines got a suitably lengthy session ahead of it as it attempts to crawl through about 2.3gb of downloads.
First up is Windows Server 2003 SP1 Platform SDK - April 2005 Edition. You need this if you're wanting to compile some of the latest DirectX SDK stuff (iirc, either the October '04 or December '04 SDK's required a PSDK update) or if you're looking to use the Visual Studio 2005 downloads. The full download clocks in at 385mb.
Next up are the various Visual Studio 2005 Express Edition Beta 2 releases. Not necessarily essential, but I plan to have a look over them at some point to get an idea of whether I want to upgrade my VS2002. There's 5 packages - C++, C#, K#, VB and Web Developer - each weighing in at around 500mb a piece.
Another, albeit old, download to mention here is the Visual C++ Toolkit 2003. It was released last summer, and if you can handle the command-line nature it's basically the full Visual C++ 2003 Professional Compiler. Can't say theres anything wrong with getting my hands on a free copy of that - and it's only 31mb[smile]
The final things that you might well want if you're a DirectX programmer (like me!) is the main April SDK (152mb), the April SDK Symbols (23mb) and the April SDK Developer Redistributables (34mb).
Alternatively, you can still find several of the previous SDK's - particularly useful if you want to get your hands on the older D3DX libraries/DLL's [smile]:
DirectX 9 February '05 Update: SDK (155mb) | Extras (36mb) | Symbols (42mb)
DirectX 9 December '04 Update: SDK (225mb) | Extras (35mb) | Symbols (62mb)
Using various combinations of the above free stuff (and using MSDN Online) you've got yourself, arguably, the most powerful windows development software - entirely for free!! I like free stuff [grin]
I'm sure plenty of you will have spotted these already, but I'm not a huge fan of the web-install stuff that Microsoft does. Sure, it works, but for some strange reason I prefer to have a nice big file that I can shove in the backwaters of my system should I need to reinstall part or all of my system (it's happened too many times [rolleyes])..
Right, I'm off to watch the last episode of Hustle ([sad])
Jack
Are you sure of this 500 MB thing? I did a web installation of Visual C++ 2005 Express, and it downloaded only 80 MBs. That's without MSDN 2005 or SQL 2005 or anything, just C++.
IIRC, the toolkit compiler doesn't come with a debug multithreaded CRT DLL, which is kinda bad [smile]