Hey people, I've been struggling to get the Visual Studio 2005 trial to work on my venerable Win2K machine which already had VS 6 installed on it. C# stuff compiles and runs flawlessly, but any attempt to compile C++ code gave me an error when spawning cl.exe. Surfed the web for similar problems, hacked my paths around a bit, and then went to the command line to try to repro the problems. Now I get told that cl.exe isn't a valid Win32 app. Oh no no no no. Yup, it's now 0 bytes and datestamped 5 minutes ago. I must have overwritten it with one of my attempts to test the compiler. No .bak file to save me. What can I do? As is well-documented, running the installer on a 2K machine can take literally hours. Even bringing up the upgrade/repair option in Add/Remove programs takes 20 minutes. Is there some way I can rebuild the cl.exe manually, or manually extract it from the install files? Failing that, does anyone know if a repair installation is likely to work? I see it as a last resort because it takes so long and makes me nervous about how flaky it'll make my setup. Cheers for any advice anyone can shed. And yes I know 2K is obsolete, but I'm not ready to upgrade just yet...

I had the same cl.exe problem with VS 6.0 ...Another reason I moved to 2005.

You shoulc be able to download MSVC++ 2005 Express Edition free, and just use
that. MSVC++ 2005 can convert MSVC++ 6.0 projects into MSVC++ 2005 workspaces.

This is what I recommend, anyways.

If you do not want to do this, a repair installation should work. I never did this though, so I am unable to help you here.

Thanks for the suggestion, but like I say, the repair installation approach is just waaaaay too slow to be of use unless I'm going to be away for the day. In the end I installed VS on another computer (which took about 5 hours -- so much for it being less painful on XP) then copied the file across. It still gives errors, but I think it'll just be a path problem, which I'll look at later!

Are you sure it overwrote it rather than placed the path to the new version earlier in the PATH, LIBRARY and INCLUDE environment variables?

Quote:Original post by Kwizatz
Are you sure it overwrote it rather than placed the path to the new version earlier in the PATH, LIBRARY and INCLUDE environment variables?

Definitely! Admittedly, PATH etc were pointing at the rubbish old VS6 versions by preference, but that's quite fixable. But cl.exe in the VS 2005/VC/bin folder was definitely truncated to 0 bytes. Now I've replaced it, it's still failing, but failing much more gracefully!

Quote:Original post by Extrarius
If it really takes that long to install the express edition, why not start the install shortly before you go to sleep?

This is 2005 I'm talking about. The only person who mentioned Express was Ravyne, who appeared to be advising Crypter to use it in preference to VS 6.

In any case, I was worried about the general effect on system stability of doing a repair or partial reinstall. I had enough trouble getting it to recover after the machine crashed during the original install -- it left me with a state that wouldn't finish the installation later, and it took several attempts to get it to uninstall and allow me to start again.

Quote:Original post by Omid Ghavami

Quote:Original post by bambuti

Quote:Original post by Extrarius
If it really takes that long to install the express edition, why not start the install shortly before you go to sleep?

This is 2005 I'm talking about. The only person who mentioned Express was Ravyne, who appeared to be advising Crypter to use it in preference to VS 6.

Actually, no. [smile] My interpretation is that they are both advising YOU to use Visual Studio 2005 Express, which is free, and throw out the hellspawn which is VC6.

EDIT: In case you haven't heard of it: Microsoft Visual C++ 2005 Express

And in case you are worried about the word Express, here is a comparison between the different versions of Visual Studio 2005.

Perhaps, but that would be rather strange, seeing as I *don't* use VS 6 and never claimed to. I mentioned having it already installed on my PC as a probable factor in having caused problems with the VS 2005 install. As for Express, yes it's a good product but it won't target PDAs. In any case, a recommendation to drop VS 6 was irrelevant to a problem with getting 2005 to work. As is all of this discussion now, seeing as I got by the original problem...