Beginning C++ 1, Setting up the Platform

Setting up the Platform

In this article I’ll be covering the prerequisites for setting up windows to be developer friendly

As you probably already know, you can build C++ programs on many, many platforms. The one I’ll be concentrating on here will be the Microsoft Windows platform (Windows XP upwards) using the Visual C++ 2008 compiler and the Boost library build environment

It’s debatable where the platform ends and the build environment begins. Traditionally the platform is a combination of the operating system and the hardware architecture. The build environment is the combination of the compiler and various libraries. The compiler and the libraries you use can have a significant effect on the nature of the language and your code. I’ll expand more on this in later articles.

I’ve chosen Windows because it is the most popular operating system and the development tools are easy to use and free. Most of my target audience should have access to at least a Windows XP computer.

Make sure you have access to both an administrator account and a normal user account on your Windows install. In general you should try to use the normal user for development. This is getting easier to do on later versions of Windows and Visual Studio. You should do all your development as a normal user with no administration permissions, this allows you to be aware of any issues relating to running as a normal user as they come up, rather than trying to deal with them all just before you try to release.

Before we install the large developer tools. There are some small tools that I find indispensable in my day to day development work. I suggest you download and install these before you carry on.

If you are using Windows XP, you will need to use the administrator account to install these tools. If you are using Vista or later, UAC (User Account Control) will prompt you either for a administrator password (If you are using a normal user) or prompt to allow the usage of administrator privileges (If you are using an administrator user).

Command Prompt Here
Command Here Registry File
A small registry hack that allows you to right click on any directory and get a command prompt.
Right click the link and select “save as” to download the file. You’ll need to be administrator in order to run it.

7-Zip
http://www.7-zip.org/
7-Zip is an open source archiving utility. It has introduced it’s own high compression format with the extension .7z and additionally you can extract almost any kind of archive including .zip and .rar. It is also Boost’s preferred archiving format for distribution.

Adobe Acrobat
http://get.adobe.com/reader/
Necessary for viewing any pdf files you encounter.

WinDirStat
http://windirstat.info/
Very useful tool for viewing your hard drive usage

Your preferred light weight text editor
http://www.vim.org/
http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net/uk/site.htm
You, can use Visual Studio as a text editor for occasional non coding editing, but I find it’s like using an 18 wheeler truck to drive down the block. So I use gvim72, which is a clone of the vi text editor from the unix world. Another good free editor is notepad++.

Virtual Clone Drive
http://www.slysoft.com/en/virtual-clonedrive.html
You’ll need this to be able to mount .iso images (CD-ROM or DVD-ROM image files) as a fake drive on your computer.

Image Burn
http://www.imgburn.com/
You’ll need this if you want to be able to burn .iso files to a cd or dvd disk.
Or if you want to copy a cd or dvd to a .iso image.

Install all updates
The next thing you should do is make sure your computer has all the latest microsoft updates installed. On windows XP, visit windowsupdate.microsoft.com and on vista or later use the update tool in the Control Panel.

In the next installment I’ll describe installing the build environment.

Happy programming