http://www.computeradvicesite.com/2719/what-would-be-a-good-free-software-development-package-for-windows/ Questions And Answers by Real Computer Users Mon, 03 Jan 2011 06:39:17 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.1 http://www.computeradvicesite.com/2719/what-would-be-a-good-free-software-development-package-for-windows/comment-page-1/#comment-5014 Anonymous Thu, 24 Dec 2009 18:04:56 +0000 http://www.computeradvicesite.com/2719/what-would-be-a-good-free-software-development-package-for-windows/#comment-5014 Microsoft's Visual Studio Express Edition is a free download, and is what most Windows-specific developers use, and the built-in debugger is really nice (haven't used many others, so I can't compare)http://www.microsoft.com/express/downloa… Check out the creators club -http://creators.xna.com/en-US/ There are a lot of other tools, most free stuff is based on a cygwin + gcc install (cygwin is a unix-like command line for Windows), and MinGW is pretty popular for gcc amongst oss folks (minGW adds a layer that lets cygwin programs use Windows calls). The local Community College uses this setup along with a decent front-end for some of their classes. Usually if I'm doing a short console program, I'll just write it in a text editor (either Notepad++ or cygwin-based emacs) and compile it command line with cygwin's gcc. If I'm doing something more complex, I'll use Visual Studio. http://www.bloodshed.net/devcpp.html - mingw front-end that local CC uses.http://www.mingw.orghttp://www.cygwin.com - when you install, either do the "full" install, or a custom install and go in and enable all the development packages. If you are looking at a specific project, check whether they use CMake - it can target either one pretty easily. If they aren't using CMake, look for a .sln file in their source tree - that would mean they're using Visual Studio. Microsoft’s Visual Studio Express Edition is a free download, and is what most Windows-specific developers use, and the built-in debugger is really nice (haven’t used many others, so I can’t compare)http://www.microsoft.com/express/downloa…
Check out the creators club -http://creators.xna.com/en-US/
There are a lot of other tools, most free stuff is based on a cygwin + gcc install (cygwin is a unix-like command line for Windows), and MinGW is pretty popular for gcc amongst oss folks (minGW adds a layer that lets cygwin programs use Windows calls). The local Community College uses this setup along with a decent front-end for some of their classes.
Usually if I’m doing a short console program, I’ll just write it in a text editor (either Notepad++ or cygwin-based emacs) and compile it command line with cygwin’s gcc. If I’m doing something more complex, I’ll use Visual Studio. http://www.bloodshed.net/devcpp.html – mingw front-end that local CC uses.http://www.mingw.orghttp://www.cygwin.com – when you install, either do the “full” install, or a custom install and go in and enable all the development packages.
If you are looking at a specific project, check whether they use CMake – it can target either one pretty easily. If they aren’t using CMake, look for a .sln file in their source tree – that would mean they’re using Visual Studio.

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