CS and CEL still support Visual Studio 6. This is going to be dropped soon (if it hasn\'t been done in these days), since it has been released and made free and public this:
VC++ 2005 Express Edition available free of charge
Please, check more info on that and I guess you will have a nice product.
Anyhow, the support of PS for MSVC 6 has been lacking of interest from the team since a lot of developers use MSVC 7.1 (and somebody 8 and others of course gcc or mingw). This means that project files are not updated, that there might be compiling errors and warnings that are not fixed and you will have to deal with them. If you are really willing to try that (still I suggest the Express Edition above), contact us on #planeshift-build and we will try to help you on fixing errors and warnings.
The guide compiling-visualc.txt that you find in the /docs directory of your Planeshift copy should guide you through the main steps.
Still, if you have trouble I suggest again #planeshift-build on freenode.
If you are not used to MSVC 6 and you are going to change to MSVC 7.1 I suggest you to wait or at least use the express edition in the while. PS support for it is reduced, but I guess it could be fixed as well - I guess more and more people will use that edition.
Regards,