Today during a brief break while working on my OpenGL project I was listening to a podcast from Channel9. They were discussing Microsoft’s new Startup support initiative Bizspark. Basically after getting the "support" of one of the Network Partners the startup is able to get an MSDN Premium subscription and Production licenses for free for up three years. Afterwards the startup gets to keep the testing licenses and software, but has to pay for the production licenses and pay MS a $100 graduation fee.

All-in-all it sounds like a great program for any Startup that is looking to develop and provide Software-as-a-service mode business solutions. I’m considering applying so that I can start working on several of the ideas I have had rolling around for services.

One of the issues I’ve run into while looking at tutorials over the last month is that there are several the use the glaux header and lib, which has been deprecated. This isn’t a show stopper, but it does mean that the samples won’t compile straight out of the box.

Two resources I’ve found that help with removing the old references and working around the issue are:

http://forums.microsoft.com/msdn/showpost.aspx?postid=2196012&siteid=1

https://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=1065518&SiteID=1

The steps are simple:

1. Download GLUT 3.7 or newer
2. Install it, copy the files to the proper include folders.
3. Remove the references to glaux in the source files for your project.
4. Remove the gluax.lib reference.
5. Add kernel32.lib , user32.lib , gdi32.lib and advapi32.lib under the link references.
6. Include the new glut.h
7. Rebuild

You can also download the old SDK from here: http://download.microsoft.com/download/win95upg/info/1/W95/EN-US/Opengl95.exe

A helpful online tool I found for troubleshooting DNS issues is http://www.intodns.com/

It has really helped a lot in figuring out some of the problems I’ve had over the last month since one of the nameservers for this site went down.