From: pgarceau AT teleport DOT com (Paul Garceau) Subject: RE: DirectX and mingw.. 30 Apr 1998 02:51:03 -0700 Message-ID: <199804292010.NAA07086.cygnus.gnu-win32@mail1.teleport.com> References: Reply-To: pgarceau AT teleport DOT com To: gnu-win32 AT cygnus DOT com On 28 Apr 98 at 19:31, the Illustrious Edward Avis wrote: > >> This seems strange...have you tried directly accessing the MS SDK via > >>http://www.microsoft.com/msdn/sdk ? Of course, I am in the US so I > >>haven't had any problems with that. You might want to give it a try... > > > >Yeah, that's exactly the site which I went to. They have completely stop > >you from dling the sdk, athough it does come up with an order form for > the > >sdk on cd. > > What is the SDK then? The SDK is all the basic headers and libs you need to build applications using VisualStudio (tm, MS), VisualC/C++ (tm, MS) or VisualBasic (tm, MS) that MS makes available from your local software retail outlet for the "mere" expense of an arm or a leg...(yes, I am cynical when it comes to MS-- it comes from a large dose of frustration with MS that has been injected into the software development market over the years). > I managed to download some stuff, the same sort of > thing you get on MSDN CDs (i.e. everything you need, except the most > important part, a compiler toolchain). "Aye...there's the rub...", MS wants you to buy their development tools, thus they will not willingly supply anything that is remotely related to successful development of Win32 or any subset of Win32 without requiring some expense on your behalf, including a portable Win32 API for GCC or any portable subset of the Win32 API. Thus the niche was created for Gnu-Win32 development tools. From what I can tell, this applies to the Borland and Watcom development environments as well. The Win32 API that is being used by the Gnu-Win32 build environments such as EGCS, Cygwin32 or Mingw32-gcc were completely developed, based on the first version of Win32, from scratch. Peace, Paul G. Information Systems Consultant NewDawn Productions http://www.teleport.com/~pgarceau/newdawn/ - For help on using this list (especially unsubscribing), send a message to "gnu-win32-request AT cygnus DOT com" with one line of text: "help".