Running Visual Studio 6 C++ in Windows 8.1

Question

I recently migrated my system to windows 8.1. Unfortunatly like some others, I am not able to start Visual Studio 6 anymore. The software is crashing at startup (splash scre

Answer 1

Another simple solution:

1. Make a copy of MSDEV.EXE to anything (for example MSDEV_XP.EXE)
2. Set the compatibility of the copy MSDEV_XP.EXE to XP
3. Launch the renamed copy MSDEV_XP.EXE instead.

Explanation:

Microsoft installs two executables, MSDEV.EXE and MSDEV.COM, one of which can be made to run in recent WINDOWS versions. If you launch MSDEV in a shell or script (a makefile for example), you don't want to launch the COM instead of the EXE, and making a copy with a different name solves that. (Also, if you leave the two files Microsoft installed as is, you can be sure you're not breaking any existing functionality)

This solved my problem when I was building with a make file which I changed to call my copy that had been changed to XP compatibility. Note that I did need to use the original MSDEV.EXE in some cases, so it's good to have both.