Using Visual Studio 2010 C++ compiler and linker without Visual Studio 2010 having been installed

Question

At my company we really like for our development tools to be able to be used from perforce, without having been installed. For a lot of tools (perforce, gcc compiler, snc compiler, even maya) this works after some tweaking, but for Visual Studio 2005 we could not get it to work. As far as we could see, the problem was caused by mspdbsrv.exe. When VS2005 was not installed, the linker would regularly exit with an error about a corrupt pdb. When VS2005 is installed, we almost never see this error.

Does anybody know if this is possible with Visual Studio 2010?

Answer 1

See here. This will install compilers, headers, and win32 development tools if you select them. Exactly what you need: toolchain without IDE.