Is Visual Studio 97/5.0 (its called both) any good?

I dont think so, its too old.

VS 5 -- VS 6 -- .NET 2003 -- .NET 2005

It must be having a lot of problems. But why not use the free IDE's out there ? Why are you so intent on using MS products ? Does your project involve too much MFC and all that ?

I still have VC 1.52C -- the last MS-DOS compiler. And it still works, if you want to write 16-bit console programs.

It doesn't really matter how old your compiler is if it does what you want it to do. But don't assume you can learn to write good c++ that meet current IOS standards with them because you can't.

Depends on what you are going to use it for. So nothing can be said exactly about it. But remember that it is not C99 standard compliant, so if you are going to use it you will find a lot of features unsupported. If you are going to pay for it, I would advice against it. If you are getting it free, and if you think it will suit you, I wouldn't say no.

But the Visual Studio 2005 Express Edition is much better and free. So I usually recommend it.

i was just wondering as i found it in my drawer my parents apparently got it as part of a student thing when i was like 7 (what normal parents try to teach a child old c++?)

it complained a bit about "IE4 is not installed" and "You need NT4 SP3" on my XP system and blue screened it so i got out my NT4 floppies and put them to use on an old sytem

BUt still you havent answered Wolfies question -- what are you giong to develop usign that ?

he he. Since you are trying to learn C or C++ I think it is better if you stick to a new compiler.
Get the Visual C++ Express Edition (A bit bulky download) or
DevCPP or
Visual Studio 2003 Command Line Toolkit (A command line compiler)

Assuming that you want to learn C/C++.

or Codeblocks

Even this one is good.

But it doesnt come with a compiler right? Don't you have to set a compiler that you have installed seperately?

Edit. No I checked you have the MingW compiler. Me bad.

modern versions i have:

VB.NET 2003 as well as all the express editons except VWD as i have XP home so no ASP (by the way C++.NET is crap in my opinion)

VC 5/97 seems ok, ive been doing some console apps in it (one thing though is i dont think its ANSI compliant)

VB5 rocks IMHO, some things are easier than in .NET

The whole 250mb VS97 SP3 is available from ftp.microsoft.com still