Please do yourself a favor and DON'T buy visual c++ 2003. It's buggy as hell.
I tried the c++2005 beta and it's MUCH better.
I am pretty sure that 2005 will run perfectly on standard xp, since the beta does as well.

edit: Typo.

vs2005 will work fine with XP and probably 2000.

I have no problem with vs2003, why do you say that its buggy as hell. A good deal of windows software is compiled and debugged on it so someone must think it works well. Including MS Office and Windows, 2 very large programs.

Cheers
Chris

At home I work with visual studio 6.
At my work, we have visual c++ 2003.Nothing but trouble
-The form editor is terrible. There are plenty of features that generate incorrect code. For example try using the form editor to change the application icon, or toolbar icons. It will not compile. you have to manualy add this in code.
-The text editor acts very strange with comments and close brackets.
Occasionally after hitting 'enter' after a close bracket, a comment that happens to be in the clipboard gets pasted after the bracket.
you will NEVER get it away.After each enter another line 'apears' in the editor.
- Try renaming an item after you have added some event bound functions. it won't happen. Somewhere the names of the items stay hidden, and the compiler will go crazy.

There were plenty more of quirks and bugs.

Most importantly the managed c++ code in visual c++ 2003 is absolutely absurd. Boxing and unboxing from managed to unmanaged code is explicit-> Yuck.
There are underscores everywhere __gcclass, __gcnew __try_cast etc.

The .net 2.0 framework with CLI apears to be much better at being a new c++/.net interface. No more underscores, managed and unmanaged code can be cast implicit, no more strange pointer stuff, but handles (^).

Also the window form code generated from the c++ 2005 form editor seems to be much better.

Also very important: the documentation for windows forms in c++ 2003 is almost non-existent. Only c# and visual basic.

therefore: Please don't buy c++2003 and wait for the 2005 edition.

Those are good points and definitely apply if you use managed C++ and winforms, they are however very narrow adn certainly don't apply to most people.

I agree that you have a reason for not using vs2003 allthough, and you may know this, clr 2.0 is in no way tied to vs2005, you can use it in vs2003, perhaps this will make you happier:)

Cheers
Chris

We could just pray that MS releases the VS2005.NET Optimizing compiler for free like it did for 2003!!!