Will the MSDN Library be of help? There are 6.0 discs in the Wayback machine.

Visual Studio 6.0 and Visual C++ 6.0 should both come with all of the documentation you need assuming you're already familiar with C++ (though there should be some basic C++ documentation in there too).

The basic install will probably include help for the IDE itself. For everything else you need to install the MSDN Library from the pair of CDs that come in the box. This will give you all the Windows SDK documentation as it was in 1998 when the product was released. This will cover the Win32 API as well as all the other Microsoft technologies from the time (COM, ATL, MFC, etc). If you want to learn the Win32 API I'd recommend the book Programming Windows by Charles Petzold. The 5th edition was released in 1998, around the same time as Visual C++ 6, while the 4th edition ("Programming Windows 95") was 1996 so contemporary with Visual C++ 4/5. So these books should cover programming for that era of windows without introducing any concepts that only apply to later windows releases.

If you're looking to build things with Visual C++ 6 its *probably* best to ignore Microsoft's website as while much of the documentation on MSDN today will apply to Visual C++ 6 its hard to be sure for any given page what will and won't work. When Microsoft says "Minimum supported client" they don't mean "Minimum client this API is available on", they mean "Minimum client supported by Microsoft that includes this API". So an API that has been around since Windows NT 3.1 might be documented on MSDN as "Minimum supported client: Windows Vista" simply because Microsoft doesn't support any older versions of windows even if the API itself does - not very helpful.

If you want the latest updates for Visual Studio 6, you can grab Service Pack 6 from here:
https://www.zx.net.nz/vc/updates/dev.shtml#vs6

Please do not link to warez sites.

Hi everyone.
My father used to develop with Visual Basic 6 at some point, which also used Visual Studio 6 as its IDE.
From what I remember, he had some MSDN Library CDs, too.

I could be wrong, but I think the MSDN Library CDs contained a collection of examples, code snippets, documents and tools previously published online by Microsoft.
By today's nomenclature, the MSDN CDs are an archive of files related to Microsoft's products.

Jo22 wrote on 2022-08-15, 22:22:

Hi everyone. My father used to develop with Visual Basic 6 at some point, which also used Visual Studio 6 as its IDE. From what […]
Show full quote

Hi everyone.
My father used to develop with Visual Basic 6 at some point, which also used Visual Studio 6 as its IDE.
From what I remember, he had some MSDN Library CDs, too.

I could be wrong, but I think the MSDN Library CDs contained a collection of examples, code snippets, documents and tools previously published online by Microsoft.
By today's nomenclature, the MSDN CDs are an archive of files related to Microsoft's products.

Visual Basic 6 (along with Visual FoxPro) retained its own IDE - Visual Basic didn't get merged into the Visual Studio IDE until the 2002 release. FoxPro just got discontinued.

As for MSDN CDs, the later releases were pretty much just a snapshot of what was freely available from msdn.microsoft.com but that wasn't always the case. The older ones are certainly a licensed product available by subscription only (aside from the special visual studio versions) and in the mid-late 90s had CD Keys, etc. They tended to contain not only the Win32 SDK documentation but also technical journals and entire books. The Microsoft Developer Network CDs from before Windows 95 came out (and before the program was rebranded as MSDN) included Programming Windows 3.1 (3rd edition) by Charles Petzold and, IIRC, the Microsoft MS-DOS programmer's Reference among others. I'll have to check when I get home from work to see what books, if any, the Visual Studio MSDN Library CDs include.

Of course all versions of Visual C++ include at a minimum the Windows SDK documentation and 5.0-2003 at least included MSDN Library CDs in the box too (4.0 might have as well, or perhaps it just had a subset on the product CD - don't remember). So assuming OP is using a properly licensed version of Visual C++ they already have all these things and just need to install them from the CDs.

(I've been doing some work with Visual C++ 2.0-6.0 recently to see if I can get C-Kermit for Windows to run on Windows NT 3.50 which has involved a lot of looking up things in various versions of the Win32 SDK documentation to see what APIs were supported when - a surprising amount changed between NT 3.50 and NT 3.51!)

Jo22 wrote on 2022-08-15, 22:22:

Hi everyone. My father used to develop with Visual Basic 6 at some point, which also used Visual Studio 6 as its IDE. From what […]
Show full quote

Hi everyone.
My father used to develop with Visual Basic 6 at some point, which also used Visual Studio 6 as its IDE.
From what I remember, he had some MSDN Library CDs, too.

I could be wrong, but I think the MSDN Library CDs contained a collection of examples, code snippets, documents and tools previously published online by Microsoft.
By today's nomenclature, the MSDN CDs are an archive of files related to Microsoft's products.

That's what it seems right, I remember Visual Studio mentioning them on install. I will go take a look at them.

davidrg wrote on 2022-08-15, 23:39:

Visual Basic 6 (along with Visual FoxPro) retained its own IDE - Visual Basic didn't get merged into the Visual Studio IDE until the 2002 release. FoxPro just got discontinued.

Um, my bad, it has been so long.
I firmly believed VB4 was the last VB with its proprietary IDE and that VB6 used VS6, too.

Edit: Replaced VB5 by VB4. VB5 used VS 97?

Edit: @Dominus Alright, I just meant to confirm what Meatball said about the MSDN Library. Because, it matched my memories from when I was young.
The set, I believe to remember, contained all sorts of stuff, for Visual C++ as well as VB and other languages.
I didn't mean to go off-topic, post links or share discs.
I just thought the information might be useful to the OP, if he/she seeks out to buy an used physical copy of them.
Knowing that they're maybe not strictly related to VS C++ only, but maybe also were bundled with VB6 (?) at some point, could help, I thought.

yeah, VB 5 was in VS97 - that was the version that introduced the MDI IDE with the dock widgets which continues to be used by Visual Basic for Applications in MS Office today - I think Visual Basic 4.0 was pretty much a continuation of the Visual Basic 1/2/3 IDE. I do have fond memories of Visual Basic 5 (and Visual Studio 97) - a family friend gave me a copy at the end of 1999 so thats what I used for a couple of years before moving on to Java/C#/C++/Python

While Visual Basic 6 retained its own IDE it didn't retain its own help system (much to my annoyance) - its documentation was combined into the rest of the Visual Studio 6 documentation set making it harder to find stuff that was relevant only to VB. Wasn't much of a fan of Visual Studio 6's documentation format either - I think I like the InfoViewer thing in Visual C++ 4.0/5.0 better.

When first trying to pick up C++ with Visual C++ 6, I came from VB5/6 and I too remember being confused you couldn't just hit f1 and look up all the language's keywords and entire API. In C++ you're dealing with the language itself (which, for VC6, is pretty small), the CRT (C runtime), STL (C++ template library), Win32 and maybe extra MS libraries such as MFC. I'm a professional C++ developer nowadays and without the internet the job would be pretty much impossible, you'll be combining cppreference.com, MSDN and StackOverflow to figure out the solution to whatever you're trying to do.