[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=%MSVCDir%\include
 set LIB=%MSVCDir%\lib
 set PATH=%MSVCDir%\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.

Once you have finished on the target system a simple ''rmdir /q /s vc6'' will get rid of the whole lot.

----
'''With Platform SDK'''

Obviously under windows you should always build stuff with the most recent headers and libraries 
you can get - which means the Platform SDK - this is a free download from Microsoft. 
If you want to apply this to the minimal installation given above, you simply need 
to copy the Platform SDK ''include'' and ''lib'' directories on top of your minimal ones. 
The result is an up-to-date command-line build environment weighing in at about 100MB 
with no entries in the registry to worry about.

----
'''IDE'''

The Visual studio IDE is also capable of being quite stand-alone. 
If you copy the MSDev98 directory from its normal location into the minimal VC6 tree 
(ie: to vc6\msdev98) you just need to set the MSDevDir environment variable 
and add %MSDevDir%\bin to the path to be away. 
(Remember to start msdev.exe from the command line so that it inherits the environment 
that lets it know where the compiler is installed.)

----

See also [Building Tcl with the free VC++ toolkit], [C]
----
[[ 
[Category Porting] - [Category Windows] 
]]