4.1 Requirements

• Operating environment: Microsoft Windows 2000 or XP. Windows XP is recommended
• Available hard drive space: 200 Mbytes (approximate)
• For interfacing with C or C++, or for using spld or splfr: Microsoft Visual C++ 6.0.

  As an unsupported alternative to the Microsoft Visual Studio tools, you can use `Microsoft eMbedded Visual C++ 4.0' or `Microsoft eMbedded Visual Tools 3.0' available for free at the download area of http://msdn.microsoft.com/. These tools come with compilers and linkers not only for embedded platforms but also for the ordinary x86 Windows environment.

  Please note: somewhat surprisingly, Visual Studio .NET 2003 cannot produce code that uses the C library (MSVCRT.DLL) that comes with the Windows XP/2000 operating system. This makes Visual Studio .NET 2003 less suitable for code that need to interoperate with the OS and existing applications. The free `Visual C++ Toolkit 2003' released in April 2004 probably suffers from the same problem. Still, it is probably possible to use these tools, at least for prototypes.

  In addition to the compiler tools, you will need the Microsoft Platform SDK.