Not quite sure what is new here. The MSVC compiler has been available for free for close to a decade at least and command line compilation was available ever since I first used it (in the mid 90s)
I wasn't aware of that. I suppose it came with the driver dev kits? I've not really been into windows development, but I thought I'd at least have brushed up it accidentally if one could use the official MSVC compiler to produce shareware and commercial software for free?
Were there any (free) IDEs that took advantage of this? I thought one of the reasons Stevens used DJGPP was that MSVC wasn't available for free? I suppose I could just be that it wasn't freely distributable, which makes it hard to bundle with a book (at a time when people can't just go and download megabytes of data from microsoft.com).
Or maybe MSVC was free, but not the c++ part? See eg:
(It's not my intention to move the goalposts, you say close to a decade, which means 2005 -- it's quite likely that I'm just biased due to my old age...)
I did literally mean a decade for the compiler (so 2005). While it is not a full IDE by any means, VS Express did include the standard VS compiler. You could compile most standard C programs on windows with that. For some time prior to that you could get a compiler with the DDK as well (but I don't remember since when; it has been a long time). Of course express didn't pack some of the libraries that came with VS; you could get most of them via the SDK and DDK however.
In the 90s though, I used the non-free VS for the most part along with some Cygwin until Mingw's appearence in the late 90s.
