Broken Tools Redux

So...

I'm not a fan of Visual Studio 2005 by any means. Before I started this recent round of home programming, I had about a week when I thought that maybe just maybe I should finally upgrade past VC6. So amongst other options, I downloaded VC2K5 Express, the C++ version and was almost instantly disappointed. It doesn't do plugins. It doesn't do source control integration. I'm pretty attached to VisualAssist and no plugins kind of kills that, but no source control is where I draw the goddamn line. I realize that VC2K5 is free but come ON. No source control? So that was pretty much the end of that.

Fast forward to today, now about 2.5 months later...

I'm trying to do some sound stuff. I have the DX9 SDK installed. All of its samples have 2K3 and 2K5 solutions and not a dsw in sight. "Aha!" I say. "I've got 2K5 Express installed! I knew I didn't uninstall that crap for a reason!" Yeah. As it turns out, the express edition also doesn't come default with some important headers that you just might need like, say, <windows.h>. I'm dumbfounded even more than I was.

As it turns out, I totally missed the part in the installation instructions to install the Platform SDK. I dunno how I managed that but hey, I'm not good at following instructions. They even have a page with instructions on how to do this but it does involve hacking up files in the Express install. No clue why they don't install the basic stuff with it but then again I may be insane and the cab download is 400 megs.

Don't want to burn a disc (my burners are flaky) so I download the 17 cab files conveniently in 25 meg chunks and then the extractor which doesn't work. You need to give it a parameter which the extractor doesn't have, oh, and you have to rename it if you want to run it from the command line because it's got a - in it which isn't kosher. And forget trying to put it on your desktop--the extractor can't handle spaces (thank god it spews paths so I could find the extracted installer). And insult to injury: the 2K5 solutions for the samples I was trying to compile were missing libraries.

As it turned out, it took longer to make my dev environment do what I need than it was to write the code to load WAVs and play sounds.