[sldev] Which code drop to build on Windows with VS 2005 Express?

[Philippe Bossut]

Hi,

I'm new to the wonderful world of slviewer coding. I started a week  
ago and, since I'm more of a Mac developer, started to download and  
compile the XCode project. I have to say that the process was as  
painless as can possibly be. In just a matter of hours, I was up and  
running with my own compiled version of the slviewer, right there on  
my old iBook G4. Kudos to the folks who wrote and maintain the wiki  
on the open source portal! Truly excellent :)

With that success, I thought I'd switch to Windows since I need to  
use an SDK that's available only on Windows in that new project I'm  
starting. I haven't done much Windows development lately so I  
downloaded the free Visual C++ 2005 Express Edition from MS, and went  
through the whole details provided in the (again, excellent) wiki. It  
took me much longer and, after a couple of tweaks that were not  
documented (but easy to figure out), I got the ReleaseNoOpt target  
compiled and linked. Alas, I can't run it properly. I first got  
errors about missing dll and xml (which I simply moved to the exe  
folder for the time being) but now I get what seems to be a code issue:
	"ERROR: Invalid getColor control ColorDropShadow"

I guess I could figure that one out too but, considering some past  
comments on that list about issues with vc8, I'm wondering if I'm not  
just going into a rat hole. May be I'm using the wrong compiler/code  
drop/target combination. Here's what I'm using:
    - Visual C++ 2005 Express Edition : should I just go and buy a  
Pro version? I saw that LL is apparently still using 2003.
    - RC-1.18.6.4 drop: May be I should be using an older source drop?
    - ReleaseNoOpt : should I build Release may be? Debug seems to be  
the hardest to build (I'm building Release right now)

Any advice appreciated.

Cheers,
- Philippe