From: Ivan R. Judson

...

Is VC2003 a fancier name for VC7.1? or at least binary compatible? Will this allow people to compile extensions without $$ to MS?

The free download is the compiler and linker and basic tools to build apps. The part that costs money is the Visual Studio Development Environment (the IDE and higher level tools), however I can find the concrete details if you want them.

The problem for Python development is that the free download VC doesn't support linking to the DLL verstion of the CRT (msvcr71). This means that there will still be CRT incompatibilities if extensions are built with this compiler :-( Mingw is another option, as the latest version of mingw allows building DLLs which link to msvcr71, but it's pretty bleeding-edge, and I haven't been able to do much work yet on proving the relevant distutils support is there, as I don't have an up-to-date Python binary build. I'm planning on doing some testing when 2.4a1 comes out... Paul. __________________________________________________________________________ This e-mail and the documents attached are confidential and intended solely for the addressee; it may also be privileged. If you receive this e-mail in error, please notify the sender immediately and destroy it. As its integrity cannot be secured on the Internet, the Atos Origin group liability cannot be triggered for the message content. Although the sender endeavours to maintain a computer virus-free network, the sender does not warrant that this transmission is virus-free and will not be liable for any damages resulting from any virus transmitted. __________________________________________________________________________