using Visual Studio on Windows 10 virtualbox image

1. Visual Studio 2019 Community edition - 20 GB download from Microsoft.
2. On my system, 45 minutes to unzip the file, since I was using a 3 TB USB external drive which was not very fast. 
3. Then 45 minutes to import the OVA file into virtualbox.
4. More downloads and installs - the default Visual Studio 2019 does not have the 'develop for desktop' SDK and tools needed for C++ console apps - 45 minutes more.
5. Spent quite a while troubleshooting why the shared folders were not visible in Win10 - turns out that sharing and discovery is turned off by default, have to enable them in Network and Sharing from the control panel.
6. Finally it turns out that projects which need earlier versions of the toolkit - like Spinnaker SDK which needs the VS2015 toolkit - won't work, complaining that the required SDK is not found. Even downloading the oldest available SDK shown for install doesn't solve the problem. Further, lots of errors with QHYCCD SDK, like

   1>J:\qhy\include\stdint_windows.h(28,1): error C2144: syntax error: 'signed char' should be preceded by ';'
   1>J:\qhy\include\stdint_windows.h(28,21): error C4430: missing type specifier - int assumed. Note: C++ does not support default-int
   1>J:\qhy\include\stdint_windows.h(70,26): error C4430: missing type specifier - int assumed. Note: C++ does not support default-int
   1>J:\qhy\include\stdint_windows.h(70,19): error C2146: syntax error: missing ';' before identifier 'int64_t'
   1>J:\qhy\include\stdint_windows.h(71,28): error C4430: missing type specifier - int assumed. Note: C++ does not support default-int
   

7. So now I'm trying the VS2015 DVD download, which is another 7.1 GB, 90 minutes. 
8. Edit - update - 45 minutes to uninstall VS 2019. 
9. Three hours forty-five minutes !! to install VS2015 from virtual DVD drive in virtualbox.
10. Then the projects compiled without too much trouble, as "Win32 console project" though I was compiling it for an x64 Release target. Will probably upload the project and solution files, along with the property pages which I created, to the github repo.
11. Just like Windows on underpowered machines, the virtualbox Win10 takes around 2 minutes to boot, around a minute to shut down, around 5 seconds after a click in order to start opening an app, and so on. On my configuration, just 2 GB RAM for the virtualbox, and it runs from an external USB drive. But things do get done.

Edit - a better solution might be to build on the cloud - my later post.