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Is the express version seriously gimped?

Express has no resource editor (but it can still compile .rc scripts, which aren't that hard to edit manually) and cannot accept add-ins like VAX. If that doesn't matter, upgrade, as you'll get some compiler bugfixes and standards-compliance-improvements.

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You'll need to download the 400Mb platform SDK to actually use it for something meaningful, though.

This is true, unless you want to do only standard C++ stuff (the SC++L and such are included in the VC++ Express package).

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What the heck did MS put in the platform SDK to make it so insanely bloated?

Everything in the Platform SDK, plus a bunch of documentation, supporting tools, and so on. GCC and MinGW actually do not have full functionality, they just have common functionality. Among other things, GCC (mingw) expects a different binary format for its libraries and understands different preprocessor directives; it's not (last I checked) compatible at all with the actual Platform SDK -- similarly the recent official DX SDKs are unsupported. So what you get with (for example), the vanilla Dev-C++ download are modified versions of the basic functionality (headers and libraries).

So, there is a lot of the more advanced functionality missing, although its likely easy enough to add (the libraries will be, for the most part, just import stubs). It would be nice to see a slimmer version of the PSDK that supported only bare-bones Win32 development without any of the extra supporting material, perhaps (although I've found most of that invaluable and I don't mind the extra bandwidth for the download), but I suspect its would take a pretty big re-engineering effort. I mean, have you looked at some of those headers? O_o

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And why didn't they include the libs and headers needed for Win32 programming by default?

Probably because the Express SKUs are primarily targeted towards new and hobby developers, who don't necessary need the Platform SDK to begin with. Plus, it's a pretty safe bet for that every person who holds your view of the situation (that the omission of the PSDK is a Bad Thing) there is another person who would hold an opposite view (that including the PSDK is a Bad Thing because it makes the Express download 400+ MB for a bunch of "crap they don't need."). So, those issues being equal, they may as well cater the thing to their target market as much as possible.

EDIT: Hm, poking around suggests that perhaps the library formats are not different, and it's only the headers and preprocessor/compiler extensions that matter. I haven't looked into this in a while, so I'll report back with anything else I find.

[Edited by - jpetrie on July 10, 2007 12:10:45 PM]

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What is SC++L? Do you mean STL, the standard template library? Or libc?

SC++L is "Standard C++ Library," it is for all intents and purposes the same as "STL," although the former is more (pedantically) correct when referring to the library that is described by the C++ Standard (STL was a SGI thing, most of which was incorporated into the C++ spec as standard). Although if you want to be really obnoxiously pedantic, I think the standard only refers to its library as the "C++ Standard Library." Although I have not read that section in nearly as much detail, as its boring, and I have no desire to dig through it to see how consistent it is in referring to itself.

The actual STL itself can be generally viewed as a subset of the full standard library. Not much really changed.

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Also - although this might just be me being blind - I can't seem to find a way to execute project files from with the MSVC 2005 IDE. I have to open a separate explorer window to do that, which I find to be very annoying.

Execute project files? You mean build and run the code? "Start" and "Start Without Debugging" under the Debug menu (or perhaps the Project menu? I don't recall offhand and I don't have VS installed here) should do it.