In order to install Visual Studio C++ 2008 on an offline PC, in order to avoid all the trouble with VSC++ 2010 (including that it can't convert old VS6.0 dsw files), I was again bitten by not having a DVD writer on my desktop PC. VS 2008 can be had as an iso file (for DVD only), as can the SDK. So, I found a couple of links on how to rip open the install configuration files and manually pull down the pieces that would be installed by the web install. Too bad this approach is so scattershot that it basically has no chance of working. I of course tried it anyhow. Here is the first article that gives the general idea:
http://vicker313.wordpress.com/2008/11/26/how-to-offline-install-visual-studio-express-without-download-the-whole-image-file/
This told me to download WinRAR to open up the setup files.
http://www.win-rar.com/download.html
From a comment in the first article, I got links to much more complete articles on how to download the pieces. It turns out that I needed a bunch more pieces. The VCPP installed easily and runs great, but I don't have any of the DLLs or .h files for compiling windows apps. It looks like I need to download the massive, DVD-iso-only SDK. I tried it piecemeal but the headers and dlls were not installed.
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/astebner/archive/2008/03/14/8214926.aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/astebner/archive/2008/03/24/8334544.aspx
That said, the above articles are pure genius.
Here is an article by somebody who has the same experience, but whose outraged post is much more poetic than I could ever be. The nice thing is that some M$ folks on the forum explain how to download the SDK. Or maybe they're robots, since it's the same answer over and over ten times in the comments.
http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/forums/en-US/vcgeneral/thread/2bfed529-fb6d-48a3-ad48-fc6301486646/
A different post on another forum which had the same answer pointed to the download page for the SDK, which warned of a problem that occurs when the SDK is installed after VC++2008:
The download page:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=E6E1C3DF-A74F-4207-8586-711EBE331CDC&displaylang=en
The problem:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/974479
Lastly, here is some advice from the comments area of social forum thread above which describes how to download a 2003 SDK and reconcile it with VC++2005, which supposedly you don't have to do with 2008 but it seems like since I've been doing everything bass-ackwards so far I'm going to have to do some of these steps:
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/applications/FreeVS2005Win32.aspx
Here's a link from another hacker who wants to take just the necessary parts of a multi-gig SDK package. He's talking about a really old version of VCPP, but these are still good hints:
http://bfilter.sourceforge.net/doc/vctk.php
