[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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See also [Building Tcl with the free VC++ toolkit], [C]

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