VC++ 2002 with VC++ 2003 Toolkit
Avishkar Autar · Aug 20 2005 · Uncategorized
I’ve been using VC++ 2002 (waiting for 2005 to be released until I upgrade) to do most of my serious programming work. As most programmers know the VC++ 2003 toolkit was released way back when and you can simply replace the 2002 compiler, linker, and libs with the 2003 ones. However, for no better reason than plain old laziness, I never got around to it. Well I’ve been playing around with templates recently and the fact that the 2002 compiler is not very standards compliant when in comes to templates finally forced me to “upgrade.” The process is fairly painless. Simply copy over and replace the /bin, /include, and /lib directories for VC++ 2002 with the ones in the VC++ toolkit 2003 directory (of course it’s always a good idea to do a backup). The only difference I saw when building was that, with a release build, the linker will produce a lot of warnings about missing a PDB (program debug database) file for the runtime library that the code is being compiled with. I can’t imagine this ever being a problem, other than a small annoyance in the build process.