OK, so I'm installing Windows XP, and I want to get back into C++ programming. I'm after suggestions as to the best IDE/Compiler.

I don't want to use Visual Studio 6, as I've always been told that it doesn't adhere to the standards. I do have a copy of VS2010 but obviously I don't mind using anything else, (preferably free) if anyone can give me a good reason not to use the MIcrosoft solution.

I have recently tried Turbo C++ for the first time in god knows how long, and if truth be told I really liked the "olde worlde" QBasic type interface.

Any suggestions / opinions?

Thanks,

John.

By the way, I might be looking at porting my creations to Linux, if that makes any difference...

If you want 'free', aren't we talking Eclipse and GCC++?

Possibly / probably, but I didn't want to sway people with my choices. I was more interested in what you cool, trendy young 'uns are using these days
There's also Bloodshed and quite a few more, but I've been out of the loop for a while, so am exploring the options.

I'm not a C++ programmer at all (Ruby / Rails work for me), but my editor of choice does support C++ and is the rather nifty Sublime Text:

http://www.sublimetext.com/

Once you get used to things like multi-cursor editing, it's hard to use other things!

Thanks, Jon. I've downloaded that, and will have a look.

It's designed to be heavily keyboard driven, so worth looking at some of the tutorial videos on what features are there and how to drive them. There's a very good packages manager available as well.

http://www.visualstudio.com/products/vi ... express-vs
2013 Express for Windows is free Vastly better than 2010 too IMO (2012 is too though)

Thanks to Dreamspark, I can get the full versions for free but only 2010 runs on Windows XP... I've minstalled VS6 and 2010 as well as the sublimetext software mentioned above, so I can explore each, (actually VS6 was just installed for fun).

I also have Eclipse, and my fall back editor, Notepad++.

Erm...

Seriously?

The motherboard is an Asus PCH-DL. Dual Xeon processors. Lovely bit of kit, but old. They only released drivers upto windows xp. I've had windows 7 running on it but it started playing silly beggars so I went back to xp.

Sent from my big ass Sony Xperia Z Ultra tabphonelet, using Tapatalk 4.

Small update: I've decided to go with Visuall C++ 2010. At least that was the plan... Unfortunately, I accidentally opened Visual Basic 2010 and started writing a small app, using databases and global variables and all manner of sh1t, and now I'm having too much fun to look at C++ until I finish this project!

Maybe it's time for me to go back into the wonderful world of I.T.

This makes me sad

+1 that was the great thing about VB, it negated the need for global variables.

Sorry guys, badly worded statement from me... I meant public variables in a public module...



This sort of thing...