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 […]
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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!)