Everyone may download it from http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/express/visualc/download/ . It comes with IDE (nice one - this is actually Visual Studio .NET 2005 stripped from some bells and whistles), optimizing compiler, runtime (static and dynamic) and standard C++ library. And also C++/CLI and .NET 2.0 (but maybe you do not mind). However, it does not come with Windows API headers and libraries. In order to compile Windows applications (and boost) one has to download Platform SDK separately (fat one), there is a link and instruction on above page. This might be interesting news for those who want to test vc-8_0 toolkit. Now I shut my mounth and sorry for spamming here. B.