A visual history of Visual C++

Summary

A visual history of Visual C++ 04 Mar 2017 Visual C++ was Microsoft's implementation of a professional Windows hosted IDE for developing Windows software. From humble beginnings, it's grown into a very versatile, popular, and powerful tool. I used every version of Visual C++ since 1.0, and thought I'd collect some Visual C++ screenshots and comments on these versions. Visual C++ 1.x Visual C++ 1.0/1.5 (16-bit)Visual C++ 1.1 (32-bit) Minimum (official) host OS versionWindows 3.1Windows NT 3.1 Minimum (official) target OS versionWindows 3.1Windows NT 3.1/Win32s 1.1 CRT DLLN/AMSVCRT10.DLL Visual C++ 1.0 was the first release of Visual C++, released in 1993 for 16 bit development. Version 1.5 was released later as a 16 bit development tool, and there was also a Visual C++ 1.1 for 32 bit development, pictured above. These represented Microsoft's first major push into a Windows based IDE for C++ development. Prior to IDEs, Windows development was mainly done with command line compilers and a developer's editor of choice, coupled with a Windows SDK that provided tools for Windows specific problems. My first experience with these versions was fairly bad: the Windows specific tools were still seperate from the IDE, so the IDE itself represented a Windows editor, and the system required a fair mount of RAM compared to a DOS based solution so performance wasn't great. The main advantage of Visual C++ as opposed to earlier tools is an integrated debugger, which particularly in 16 bit Windows, was a huge advance. Note that 16 bit Windows is a cooperatively multitasked system, so a process cannot be "stopped" to debug it or the system will hang; previous debuggers relied on stopping and debugging all of Windows. Visual C++ would emulate the behavior of a stopped process without actually stopping it, giving the appearance of interactive debugging. In 32 bit land the world was very different. Visual C++ 1.1 shipped with tools that contained useful bug fixes over the original NT SDK...