Educational usage for using the Microsoft assembler.

[hutch--]

Of late there has been a considerable amount of noise about using MASM within an educational context and attached to that noise is some of the common misinformation that is usually associated with people who are hostile to both MASM and Microsoft generally. Now contrary to some of the invective and propaganda, Microsoft currently make MASM available from their own web site at the following URL.

http://download.microsoft.com/download/win98SE/Install/Gold/W98/EN-US/98DDK.EXE

The enclosed version is ML 6.11 which needs to be patched using the standard Microsoft 6.14 patch. The direct link to Microsoft for the 6.14 patch is,

ftp://ftp.microsoft.com/Softlib/mslfiles/ml614.exe

The EULA has been verified by Microsoft as a valid Microsoft EULA and this grants the user specific rights of use and distribution that does not depend on opinion or peddlers of alternative assemblers.

Depending on the jurisdiction of the educational institution, it would be wise to have the EULA investigated by the appropriate legal department to ensure that the use that the educational instution had in mind was properly addressed by the 98DDK EULA. While I am no longer up to date with such licencing issues, Microsoft have numerous deals available for bulk licencing for educational institutions which appar to be low cost methods of obtaining the necessary binaries to learn assembler programming.

Apart from ML.EXE, Microsoft also make the VCTOOLKIT2003 available at no cost whatsoever at the following URL.

http://www.microsoft.com/Downloads/details.aspx?familyid=272BE09D-40BB-49FD-9CB0-4BFA122FA91B&displaylang=en

This will also supply a very good version of CL.EXE, LINK.EXE and the resource compiler RC.EXE.