Using Visual Studio's 'cl' from a normal command line

Question

Visual Studio 2003 and 2005 (and perhaps 2008 for all I know) require the command line user to run in the \'Visual Studio Command Prompt\'. When starting this command promp

Answer 1

Create your own batch file (say clenv.bat), and call that instead of cl:

@echo off
:: Load compilation environment
call "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\VC\vcvarsall.bat"
:: Invoke compiler with any options passed to this batch file
"C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\VC\bin\cl.exe" %*

clenv.bat can now be invoked just like cl.exe, except that it will first load the needed environment variables first.