On Sunday, 1 September 2013 at 21:08:24 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:

On 9/1/2013 1:56 PM, Andrej Mitrovic wrote:

On 9/1/13, Brad Anderson <eco@gnuk.net> wrote:

What I need from you guys and your different VS installs is,
for each one, a bug report with what is necessary to get it
installed. Then we can add it to the modern version of my
floppy disk "linker collection".

This can be automated easily enough.  The installer can detect
what versions of VS are installed and either set an environment
variable or modify sc.ini (your choice).  It could probably be
made forward compatible since Microsoft has been using basically
the same paths and registry keys for every new release since at
least VS 2005.

Yes, and VS comes out what, maybe once a year? This is possible to
implement and maintain. If it weren't, then installing VS plugins
would be impossible, but as far as I know it mostly works out of the
box (hell, VisualD does it, so why can't we do something as simple as
detect VS paths?)

Pull requests are, of course, welcome.

https://github.com/D-Programming-Language/installer/pull/22

It can detect (through registry keys) the paths of Visual C++ 10, 11, and 12 (2010, 2012, and 2013) and Windows SDK 7.0A, 7.1A, 8.0, and 8.1.  It modifies the sc.ini installed from the zip file by substituting the defaults with the detected paths (which makes it important I have accurately reflected what the sc.ini defaults will be).

I only have VC 10 to test with myself (and lack the disk space to have concurrent installations of all 3).  I installed the Windows SDK 7.0A (comes with VC 10), 8.0, and 8.1 though I couldn't actually use 8.0 and 8.1 successfully because of the path tail issue Dmitry pointed out (and you opened a pull request to fix).

The combination of VC 10 and SDK 8.1 did not work (link errors) but VC 10 with 7.0A worked perfectly.  I imagine you need to pair the SDK with the version of VC that was released around the same time.