http://bytepointer.com/articles/vs7.1_2003_on_win7_pdb_handle_leak_bug_unofficial_fix.htm

For maintain older projects, now I’m sticking with VC2005.

Heh, when I bought Visual Studio 2003 Enterprise Developer it was for the bundled servers. I used that Windows 2000 Advanced Server for a long time. The compiler itself wasn’t that great, and .NET 1.1 was an instant classic after .NET 2.0 in 2005 and Vista dropping support for 1.1 in 2006.

I don’t know exactly what you mean by “just works” but for me the issue was you need to install the 2003 CRT DLLs on XP for code to “just work”, or you can statically link the CRT. But Visual C++ 6 really does “just work” because MSVCRT.DLL is already installed on Win98/Win2k and above. So if you take Visual C++ 6, then pair it with the 2003 SDK, you have all the API support and none of the distribution headaches. Unfortunately the 2003 SDK is a real PITA to install, since it used the ActiveX IE hosted installer thing.

In 64 bit land, the 2003 SP 1 SDK shipped with a 64 bit compiler that links against 64 bit MSVCRT.DLL too. This compiler is a few months before Visual C++ 2005 shipped. Queue “the best things in life are free…”

And yeah, I also got a few copies of XP Home and Vista Home Basic for $5 at the end of their respective lives. I think I’ve thrown most of those away.

That makes total sense!

I cheated and dug out old project files from older versions that supported either 2003 or VC 6, and just pasted those project files into place. I figured that many of these things are ‘established’ enough that there wouldn’t be any significant file drift. Turns out I guess I got lucky as there was none at all, it just worked.

I don’t know why the new fancy WordPress editor will do stupid stuff like that from time to time, it looked great in the preview, but yeah it decided to base64 that quote.

I tried cleaning the solution, even as far as to remove the Debug/Release folders and all pdb’s and anything ‘new’ outside of the project files and it still errored out.

Oh yeah and rebooting, re-launching over and over… it always failed. It wasn’t until I removed the Windows XP SP3 compatability flag then it’d let me do a full rebuild.

I don’t understand how or why, just know that was the only thing that did anything.

For the third party libraries for VS2003 and VS2005 I had to to Visual Studio Project Converter since those libraries only supported newer versions of VS but with VS2008 as my new minimum didn’t have any issues since those libraries supported that version.

Is my browser not able to show this correctly, or it’s a sneaky base64 quiz?

“fatal error C1033: cannot open program database” – I would check the output folder permissions, delete any stray PDB files, and try to build again. If this fails, building in release mode without debug symbols should fix it (or not – compilers are weird)

I was going to see if the resulting binary “just runs” on XP. I picked up a bunch of XP home packages for $5 each.

And it was kind of a point to use it, I paid a good $30 for Visual Studio 2003 Enterprise Architect.