I am a embedded developer (most of my work is done with 'C' using various IDE's in the Windows environment but don't have a lot of background with Visual Studio (have done a couple of apps but no guru for sure). I have a Windows 7/sp1 on on 64 bit intel based computer.
I have been trying to get up on a version of opencv (don't really care which one at this point) so I can run the tutorials and become acquainted with it for some future development projects. I have had a lot of trouble just getting to the point where I could start using the visual studio environment to start compiling the test projects. I finally elected to down load the anaconda build and was able to get to the point where I could import numpy and cv2 (from whatever version of opencv that I had downloaded) without errors. Now I am trying to run the simple test program (opencv equivalent of hello world) and cant get it to compile for various reasons. I just downloaded the version 2.3.1 (mainly because it has all the libraries compiled which are referenced in the tutorial). This required me to download an old version of visual studio (10) as an iso image and burn it to a cd which hopefully will allow me to install visual studio 10 (since all the libraries were compiled in that environment...).
My question: Is there a simpler way to get up on OpenCV? If necessary I can create a virtual box running Linux and approach it from that direction. It just seems that all the tutorials are out of date and everything I try doesn't work for some reason or another. What is the best way to become familiar with OpenCV?
Thanks for whatever help you can give.