我真的需要Visual Studio吗

Question

Do I really need Visual studio to build c/C++ application on Windows. Is there any way to have makefiles and get the application built.

Answer 1

You can use any compiler that'll target Windows (for example, MinGW , Digital Mars , Comeau or others). All of them can be driven by the command line so you can use your preferred make utility (or other build utility).

That said, Visual Studio is pretty nice (even the free version ). And don't forget that it installs the command line compiler tools, so you can drive it from a makefile as well (unfortunately, it won't spit out a makefile for you anymore, but it has it's own command line tools to drive a build based on project settings if you want to jump from IDE to command line builds).

Answer 2

If you want to stick to the Microsoft toolchain but don't want the IDE, you can use cl and link to build from the command line in conjuction with either the MSBUILD system or NMAKE .

If you don't have the compiler it is available free with VC++ Express .

Answer 3

To install the Microsoft compiler without installing an IDE download the Windows SDK which is available for free.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_SDK

Answer 4

Qt is very nice, and downloading and installing the SDK gets you the QtCreator which provides a consistent IDE across platforms, with very nice builtin help, build system, access to revision control, debugging, ... and it even includes the MinGW compiler and toolchain for you.

MinGW is something simpler: the usual GNU toolchain but setup such that it provides native Windows binary.

Last but not least, there is Cygwin which gives you the most Unixy flavour.

Answer 5

No, you don't.

I know you said c, but you can also check out MonoDevelop, should you choose to do more than just that: http://monodevelop.com/Download

Answer 6

No you do not. There are many free IDE's out there, or you can do everything from the command line with a non-microsoft compiler.

www.bloodshed.net offers a pretty good IDE that uses the Mingw compiler.

Answer 7

You can even do without extra tools as long as you have the compilers on your machine. Take a look here for an explainatin:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms235639.aspx

Answer 8

Not at all. It is quite possible to do Win32 programing, including OS and GUI programming, with gcc from Mingw .

For all my hobby work, if I can I use the gcc compiler from Mingw (for C or Ada), with Emacs as my IDE and gnumake for my build system. There are good Mingw ports for all the major revision control systems too, including Git.

That's the toolset I used to create the SETI@Home Service , which was a wrapper for the SETI@Home client that installed and ran it as a Windows service, did failure detection and auto restarts, and had a built in web server for monitoring. All that with no VisualStudio.

Answer 9

You can use Eclipse with C/C++ Development Toolkit and with Mingw Compilers. the only problem is that you will not have M$ Stuff like MFC, but you can use QT or wxWindows

Answer 10

Two solutions that immediately come to mind:

• Cygwin
• MinGW

Using makefiles does not prevent you from using the Microsoft C++ compiler, which is nice if you want to use the VS debugger.