put the freeglut folder somewhere else, e.g. Instead (apologies for any inconsistencies, I'm basing these instructions on VS2010). Installation instructions usually suggest moving these files into the visual studio folder and the Windows system folder: It is best to avoid doing this as it makes your project less portable, and makes it much more difficult if you ever need to change which version of the library you are using (old projects might suddenly stop working, etc.)

lib: contains library files for compilation/linking include: the header files for compilation bin folder: this contains the dll files for runtime When you download these you'll find that the Freeglut folder has three subfolders: 'Martin Payne's Windows binaries' is posted at above link and works on Windows 8.1 with Visual Studio 2013 at the time of this writing. If you don't see the 'lib' folder, it's because you didn't download the pre-packaged set.

You'll find pre-packaged sets of files from here: You won't have to change your code at all, and a few additional features become available. GLUT is very dated now and not actively supported - so you should certainly be using Freeglut instead. OpenGL should be present already - it will probably be Freeglut / GLUT that is missing.

Download visual studio code 2012