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A visual history of Visual C++ (2017)
04 Mar 2017 Visual C++ was Microsoft's implementation of a professional Windows hosted IDE for developing Windows software. From humble beginnings, it's grown into a very versatile, popular, and powerful tool.
By default the headers would use new structures that are only supported when Internet Explorer 4 was present, so unless a developer consciously set values like _WIN32_IE themselves, programs generated tended to have an IE4 dependency. The change to the CRT DLL meant that it was not loaded on any released version of Windows at the time, whereas MSVCRT.DLL was almost ubiquitous by this point, so there was no incentive to use 2003 as opposed to Visual C++ 6 with a newer SDK. The CRT DLL was marked to run on Windows NT 4 but the developers had clearly not read the fine print on MSDN, which indicated that GetLongPathName is only available via a statically linked library and is not in the base system.
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