Does Visual Studio 2008 support windows 98?

Question

We're looking at upgrading from Visual Studio 2005 to Visual Studio 2008. I discovered the following disturbing comment:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/6sehtctf.aspx

"Beginning with Visual C++ 2008, Visual C++ does not support targeting Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows ME, or Windows NT."

Does this mean that if we rebuild our products with visual C++ 2008, they will stop working on Windows 98 machines? It sounds like it, but I have trouble believing they'd make that big a change.

Thanks for your help.

Answer 1

It's not just about .NET 3.5. It's about the Windows SDK header file macros and definitions pulled in by the mandatory version bump in WINVER. So yes, Colen, Visual C++ 2008 binaries will target the Windows NT APIs only and while occasionally they may work on 98 you should assume that you cannot use Visual Studio 2008 to target Win9x. You will have to use VS2005 or older.

Answer 2

Yes it does mean that: The windows CreateProcess and LoadLibrary APIs on Windows NT before 2000 and all of Windows (95,98 AND ME) will not load a DLL or EXE file made by VS9 because the PE header in the file has the required OS version field set to 5.

The error message upon attempting to load a VS9 generated exe file will (be a very unfriendly modal error dialog) actually say "You need to upgrade your operating system to run this program".

I experimented with editing the field to 4 - the binary will be loaded, but any use of the VS9 c-runtime will hang or crash the process. There are ways to get VS9 projects to not use their native c-runtimes but if massive use of c++ features is important to you this approach is not going to scale past a small application.

VS8 / VS2005 has most of the features of VS9 but still targets early OS versions which is why at my shop we are sticking with that for the moment.