What I would suggest (and I would be interested in doing) is going from project to project and help them get something compatible with the free VC7 then move on to the next project and have a archive with HOWTO's with the VC7 on a website (possibly hosted on sourceforge?) so that others can find out how to do it.
A very good suggestion, you got my++. As a starting point, you may refer to Corion's tryouts with perl.
Personally, I never had problem compiling Apache2 + OpenSSL + mod_perl with VisualStudio .NET 2003 Pro + Platform SDK from a command line, so I'm sure you could do it quite easily directly with VC7 (without forgetting the PSDK).
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HTH, Dominique
My two favorites:
If the only tool you have is a hammer, you will see every problem as a nail. --Abraham Maslow
Bien faire, et le faire savoir...
