For anyone familiar with Linux or Unix and loves to compile code on the command line, but you have to use Windows, there is a solution for you yet. Microsoft has a C++ command line compiler for download. The compiler is part of the
Microsoft Visual C++ Toolkit 2003.
I have been playing around with this compiler to do a few things. One of the first things I noticed was that the library directory of the Toolkit is limited as compared to the library files available from a full install of Visual Studio .NET or any other MS IDE. This makes sense because the Toolkit is limited because it is simply used to compile code on the command line, however, there are times when you need to link in MSVCRT.LIB and it is not available.
There is an easy solution to this problem. Simply download the
beta express version of Visual Studio .NET 2005 and you will have important library files that may be available in the toolkit. Of course if you already another version of Visual Studio installed on your computer, you can use those files too.
Here are some examples of how the command line compiler can be used once it is installed properly.
cl /c /O2 /G6 /MD /nologo /W3 -DWINNT example.c
link /nologo /nodefaultlib:LIBC.LIB /OPT:NOREF /INCREMENTAL:NO /DLL /OUT:example.dll example.obj someexternallib.lib
/LIBPATH and
/I can be used to specify additional library and include paths.
Hope you guys enjoy this one. No more having to deal with the troublesome project options anymore. I have never enjoyed that part of the MS IDE's because there is no way to (or I have not found it yet) import and export a project's settings. I think it would be super sweet if you could import project settings as an xml file. Then you could save your settings as a template for different project types ...... like for example.