Hello. I searched the forum, but I was surprised
not to find any post describing a situation similar to the one that I have encountered, thus I am asking for some help.
Over the years I developed a large project in plain C.
I remained focused on my project and didn't feel any need to change developing tools, or OS and I was pretty satisfied of my HW too. It's so that I remained stuck to Visual C++ 6.0 Pro and XP until a couple of months ago, when, approaching the end of support for XP, I decided it was really time for a change.
I thus made a big leap to Win 8.1 and renewed my HW, which is now several times faster than my old PC's. However the old VC 6.0, is no more compatible with the new HW and OS, and I had to find new tools for development.
I could import my old project in VS Express 2013 introducing only minor changes to the code and to the project settings, I could build it, well... getting a long list of warnings, but at the end the executable runs smoothly in the new machines. I was surprised!
The only problem with VS Express is that it doesn't support resource editing.
Searching for a solution I found Pelles C and gave it a try.
The good news is that P. C can read my .rc file and I was able to edit it and bring it back in VSE and compile it.
I also liked the style and essence of P. C, which is very close to the old VS style which I was used to.
I wandered why not to use P. C for everything, but here comes the bad news: I was unable to build my project with P. C!
In order to find all the necessary definitions I had to use the VSE include files, in place of the include files that come with P. C., but even doing so I was unable to compile my files.
At first I get a warning saying that there are duplicate symbols in the include files, later I get a long list of errors. The most common is error #2002 (invalid combination of types), but also #1050 (redeclaration of macro) and even some syntax errors!
Another inconvenience is that Pelles C build stops at the first file that it cannot compile, thus it's also hard for me to predict all the problems that I may encounter.
The situation seems hopeless, but I wonder if there is perhaps some trick to overcome all these problems. Is there a compatibility mode that I can enable? A particular combination of compiler settings that I can use?
Otherwise the least resistance path for me would be to go for VSE and use Pelles C just for resource editing, like I said above, although I don't quite like it.
Thank you for reading so far and thanks to whom of you can give me useful suggestions.