Let’s say you need to compile your C++ project under MS Windows and you need to use the Microsoft’s toolchain instead of MinGW. Buying the whole Visual Studio is not necessary. I like a simple combination gvim+scons+gcc which gives me a high amount of flexibility. I just needed to switch the gcc to the MS compiler.

There are 2 options: Visual C++ Express or Windows SDK. SDK is better because:

• contains 64-bit compiler,
• contains debugging and profiling tools.

I had two little problems with running this SDK toolchain under Windows 7. There is a broken vcvars32.bat. Running it gives an error:

ERROR: Cannot determine the location of the VS Common Tools folder.

Solution is simple. Patch mentioned in the forum answer has a little flaw. Paths must end with a backslash. Then the compiler gave me another error:

fatal error C1083: Cannot open include file: ‘windows.h’: No such file or directory

Insert following line at the beginning of vcvars32.bat:

@SET WindowsSdkDir=c:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v7.1\