Hmm, I''ll look into it. It''s not excessively expensive and since I don''t spend money this should be good. Also, would my local college have VC++ 6.0 Standard or not? Cause I am hearing from people that all colleges do for a cheaper price, then I hear that is wrong, so I need to know.( Gotta wait till Monday anyway.)

You know, other than the complete integration of all the development tools in a single environment, I haven't been terribly impressed with Visual Studio .NET. In my tests, C and C++ code results in larger and somewhat slower executables, and this is true no matter what combination of optimizations I use. It's puzzling. So, I develop C and C++ stuff in VS .NET, then use VC++ 6.0 for final builds. You'd think with all of that fancy full-program optimization stuff they did with the compiler that it'd actually make the silly thing run faster. At least they fixed the for scope issue.

Colleges sell the academic editions of software, and you usually have to go through some trouble to prove eligable for that pricing. At my school, I had to give up my ID for a while and sign a bunch of paperwork. But the prices are great. However, I'm not convinced that the product you already have is problematic. VC++ itself comes on a single disc, and if it were damaged, you'd get plenty of errors while installing it. And if the disc has a silk-screened label that looks like genuine Microsoft, then it probably is and has the real deal on it. So, my guess is that you should completely uninstall what you have, then reinstall. If that doesn't work, try installing it on a completely different machine. If it works, then your machine isn't set up properly. Otherwise, the disc indeed is bad, and you should raise hell with the vendor. Only after doing all of that should you declare that it's defective and be willing to shell out even more funds for another product. But, hey, it's your money.


[edited by - merlin9x9 on July 19, 2002 5:30:26 PM]

That''s how I found out it was defective. Ran it on 2 other computers with the same results. But, I found a cheaper compiler that is close to the same thing, Dev-C++. See, before I downloaded DevC++ 5, which is still in beta. Now, I have Version 4 and everything is all right. Thanks everyone.

fishbulb52 meant "console," not "DOS." But clearly he''s one of the many ignorant people who assumes that character-mode means DOS, or simply doesn''t realize that Windows console apps are 100% legitimate Windows apps (you can even create windows and message pumps with them, which is something that DOS apps could never hope to do).

Dev-C++ is not a compiler. It''s an IDE. There''s a big difference.

quote:Original post by null_pointer
The standard edition of Visual C++.NET does include an optimizing compiler. Anybody with the standard edition of the compiler can prove this in two minutes. However, you cannot customize the optimizations very much and there is no profiler included. IMO, this is just fine for people who are new to game programming, because the compiler attempts to choose the best options automatically.

According to Microsoft, Visual C++ .NET Standard includes the "Non-optimizing C++ Compiler"... straight from the horse''s mouth.

VC 6 Standard (this is the version I have) sure doesn''t do any optimizing, so I wonder why they''d go out of their way to give VC 7 a valuable freebie (un-advertised too!). The optimizing options being greyed out says to me "we don''t do optimization at all" rather than "we force a certain type of optimization on you." Apart from licensing, the main reason to get Pro is for the optimizing, so I doubt they''d give something valuable away for $85 or however cheap the standard version is.

But I agree that for someone starting out, you don''t really need the optimizing. However, if you''re like me and have been programming for a few years (well past the newbie stage) but don''t make a living off it (yet), it''s quite annoying to have your apps run pretty slow. But it''s just something you have to deal with for the time being. I sent my project source to someone with Professional, and the code compiled 6 times faster (in some parts) than my compilation using Standard... just about the only optimization mine could be doing is to save space, then again it makes 300kb+ EXE''s for relatively simple apps so I don''t know about that.. lol

I considered buying Professional, but I''ll wait until I''m back in school in the fall, and get the student pricing