PT 15-Jul-2004 The standard installation of Microsoft Visual Studio is some 400MB. I recently needed to do some debugging on a machine that I didn't want to install VC6 on (because it can be hard to properly uninstall). However, if all you need is VC6 to compile stuff, then you don't need all the other stuff. Here is how. Note that my target was building tcl - if you are building something else you may need to copy a few more bits.
Create the following directory tree.
vc6 |-bin |-include |-lib
Copy the whole of lib and include directories from your VC98\ to your new tree. Then copy from the VC98\bin directory to your bin directory cl.exe, c1.dll, c1xx.dll, c2.dll, cvtres.exe, lib.exe, link.exe and nmake.exe Then copy from MSDev98\bin to your bin mspdb60.dll, rc.exe and rcdll.dll.
Setup a vc6setup.bat file with the following to create a build environment
echo Setting environment for minimal Visual C++ 6 set MSVCDir=drive:\path\to\vc6 set INCLUDE=%MSDEVDir%\include set LIB=%MSDEVDir%\lib set PATH=%MSDEVDir%\bin;%PATH% Title Minimal VC6 build shell
You can now open a new command shell and run the batch file to setup a build shell. To build tcl you can now cd to tcl\win and do
nmake -f makefile.vc OPTS=none release
The installation takes about 70MB disk space so can easily be put on a USB memory stick if needed.
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