What version of C++ is needed for plug-in development?

[bokkie]

Chaps,

I have had limited success building some of the plug-ins samples using VS.Net C++ 2008. It's not that the code wont compile but rather because VS.Net has deprecated some code and a few, seemingly correctable errors occurred elsewhere? So this leads me to think the VS.Net C++ 2008 is not necessarily the best compiler and builder to use.

What do you use for compiling and building plug-ins? Visual C++ 6? Service packs? etc...

[MichaelNesmith]

Any version of any language which can create ordinary Win32 DLLs using the stdcall calling convention will work. The samples were built with Visual Studio 6.

[bokkie]

That was my problem. Although .Net went through the process of converting the project there were a number of deprecated functions and two compilation errors which looked quite nasty. I think I will hunt for VC++6 in our MSDN disk box. Better perhaps to compile and build using the same tools as it was written with.

By the way: What's the story with Delphi these days as I believe you can write plug-ins with that? I almost get the impression that Delphi's light is much dimmer now seeing that VS.Net has conquered much of its traditional market. Is anyone writing plug-ins with Delphi?

[MichaelNesmith]

That's unfortunate. Would anybody care to post an updated project collection for the modern line of VS tools? It's just a couple function exports...

[bokkie]

Michael, I'd be happy to try and do that but not knowing how the internals of plug-ins work I'd probably be at a disadvantage. I did manage to convert the GenerateGuid plug-in to VS.Net 2009 C++ and that seemed to work ok at both compile time and when used in MSI code.

But that was a different beast to the eval.zip plug-in code I downloaded from another forum thread which is where the worst compilation errors announced themselves.