I just tried Horde3D, and all I did was this:
1. Extract Horde3D somewhere.
2. Go into the Horde3D SDK folder.
3. Double-click on Horde3D.sln
4. Press F5, wait for it to compile, and watch it run.
The Horde3D samples work just fine here.
One thing I noticed was that the Horde3D library doesn't come precompiled - only the source is included. This means that if you had opened only the .vcproj files of the samples, it wouldn't work because Horde3D wouldn't be compiled automatically as it is with the .sln file.
Edit: I just tried Horde3D with Visual C++ 2008 Express, and it worked just as well (the only difference is that VC++ 2008 will upgrade the solution and project files when you first open it, since they were originally from VC++ 2005).
1. Extract Horde3D somewhere.
2. Go into the Horde3D SDK folder.
3. Double-click on Horde3D.sln
4. Press F5, wait for it to compile, and watch it run.
The Horde3D samples work just fine here.
One thing I noticed was that the Horde3D library doesn't come precompiled - only the source is included. This means that if you had opened only the .vcproj files of the samples, it wouldn't work because Horde3D wouldn't be compiled automatically as it is with the .sln file.
Edit: I just tried Horde3D with Visual C++ 2008 Express, and it worked just as well (the only difference is that VC++ 2008 will upgrade the solution and project files when you first open it, since they were originally from VC++ 2005).