Microsoft Windows

Windows Development

I'm primarily a Unix developer, but some of the code that I maintain has to run on Windows. Here's a list of useful things for other Unix programmers that are put into this position.

Microsoft VC++

Microsoft makes "express" versions of its Basic, C#, C++ and J# compilers available for free]. Presumably this is to compete against cygwin, which lets you compile and run traditional Linux/Unix free software on Windows. (I don't like using cygwin myself, becuase it requires the use of a special Cygwin DLL, it has traditionally had problems with multi-threading, and there have been performance issues in the past. But for many jobs Cygwin is probably just fine.)

Cryptography on Windows

Windows has a built-in CryptoAPI that can perform most cryptographic functions, but the API is completely non-standard. Microsoft posted an example C program to calculate the MD5 hash of a file using the CryptoAPI. Getting this program to actually compile requires that you install the Platform SDK in addition to the C++ compiler. Successfully linking the program requires information not present on the MSDN web page. I have uploaded the source code and a makefile for Microsoft's NMAKE to this server.

However, it's usually easier just to include md5.h and md5.c if that's all you need.