Microsoft Visual C++

Microsoft Visual Studio C++ .NET Standard 2003 Microsoft Visual Studio is a good compiler for developing Windows applications. Although Visual Studio presents a ton of choices to the user when first starting out (for instance, there are a lot of different project types), the amount of choice gives a good idea of the overall scope of this tool. This is a truly high-end compiler and it also comes with Microsoft's Visual Studio IDE, which many people swear by.

For Windows programming, there's nothing better than Visual Studio-- it come with a pretty powerful IDE including the basics such as syntax highlighting and code formatting, nice features like keyword completion and the ability to get the type for any variable, and a great debugger. It is expensive, but if you want to program for Windows, it's a good choice.

Visual Studio Tips and Tricks

Visual Studio has an excellent and highly configurable debugger. Check out this article if you're like to avoid stepping into common functions like operator new or begin and end for STL containers.