The Many Faces of Visual C++

Microsoft has an uncanny ability to confuse and befuddle users with the ever changing names of products across versions. Visual C++ is no stranger to this concept and I'm often left with trying to interpret some innocuous sounding statement into something meaningful to my simple mind.

You need to link with the VC8's libs.

Ok, great, now what does that mean? Is that version 8.0 (as reported by the binary)? Is it "Visual C++ 2008"? One could go mad trying to understand that each version has three different ways to identify and name it. To simplify my own life, I've created a chart with the last handful of versions and their equivalent names, hopefully this will be useful to others as well.

Comments

• Anonymous
  December 22, 2010
  So what is the header of the third column?

• Anonymous
  February 09, 2011
  The third column is the compiler version (isn't it ?)