[Mike Mahar]

I'd recommend getting Eclipse and gcc and playing with that until your team gets its controller. Once you get the controller, you will get Wind River's development environment. I think they said that you get 25 licenses. I'd use Wind Rivers environment over any other. Eclipse is pretty good and well worth learning but the main reason is that it comes with all of the stuff you need to build with VxWorks built in. VxWorks is the underlying operating system for the cRio and you'll probably have to use that.

If you don't have enough disk to install Visual C++, than you should get another disk. They're very cheap and you could probably pay for it by collecting the lunch money of your team.