You may wish to build and run gtkmm applications on Microsoft Windows with the free-of-cost Visual Studio 2005 Express Edition. The following instructions descibe how to configure a workstation to build gtkmm applications easily. If you already have Visual Studio 2005 Standard Edition or above, skip to the section titled Installing Gtkmm

Download Visual Studio 2005 Express from Microsoft's Visual C++ Download Page.

After installing VS 2005 Express, you'll need to download the Windows Platform SDK. Because Microsoft requires that you validate your Windows install using the GenuineAdvantage ActiveX control, you must download it using Internet Explorer from a Windows box with a valid license.

The Platform SDK can be downloaded from the platform SDK download page.

After installing the Platform SDK, use the instructions from Brian Johnson's MSDN page to configure Visual Studio to build native Win32 Applications.