Hi there, I''m a hardware type guy. I''ve done C programming i various unix environments, as well programming in various specific platforms like Matlab, Labview, ect in windows. I''m also a game player that first tried game programming on my C64, but was never very sucessful. I''ve recently been dinking around with Dev C++ on my home Win system, and I thought, for fun, that I would pick up a book on network game programming, so I just got a copy of "Developer''s Guide to Multiplayer Games". I like the content of the book. I wanted a simple but in depth example of a server with a database and a simple 2d client, but I was a bit surprised that the book seems to give all its Win instructions from a Microsoft Visual Studio environment. I don''t know that much about VS, but looking around it seems to be priced upwards of $1k, which is silly for my wants. Is it going to be very difficult to use Dev-C++ instead of MS-VS for the purposes of this book, should I just return the book, or is a MS product pretty much necessary for programming Win? Thanks for the help.

A lot of development especially the big game devolpers use Microsoft Visual Studio for making games and applications. That book does gear towards Visual Studio but you should be able to make programs using borland or even a free compiler plus notepad.

Anyways i''m not sure if you were looking at Visual Studio .NET(7.0) for pricing or Visual Studio 6.0

Since 6.0 is what they use in that book i did a quick search on google and already found an enterprise edition of 6.0 for $499. If your a student you could get it even cheaper.

Hope this helps

So Visual Studio is basically an "ease of use" tool, and not a "you must have it for certain applications" tool? Maybe I should ask this question on the newbie board. It really surprised me that they would assume the book buyer has a multiple hundred $ piece of software without mentioning it on the cover... especially when all the software it does mention on the cover is either cheap (windows), or free (every thing else: Linux, MySQL, OpenGL SDK, ect).

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You can do fine with Dev-C++ under windows. SDL has precompiled libs for it (well, mingw32 anyway which it is based on) and getting most other libs working only takes a little effort. Things you cannot expect to build are MFC apps but the base win32 API is all present.

I haven''t read the book so I don''t know exactly but you will have no trouble building networking or graphical or whatever apps with Dev-C++ (use SDL or Allegro to get up quickly, or try DirectX if you feel masochistic ).

The IDEs and support tools will be different but hopefully you can work around any VC++ specifics in the book.

And the Visual C++ standard edition is less than $100us. The Multi-hundred dollar versions are mainly for full-blown pro development. They have additional optimizers as well as other stuff. For example, Visual Studio 6.0 comes with Foxpro, Visual InterDev, C++ and VB. That is why it cost so damn much...


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