Actually, distutils is looking for Visual Studio first in registry, then by env vars. So it should find VS without setting up anything. You just need to have correct version istalled (the banner in repl will tell you that, for example, for ActiveState Python 2.7 = VS2008, 3.x = VS2010).

I was also pleasantly surprised, building python C extensions under Windows is easy. Building some of the C or Fortran dependencies, on the other hand, might be not.

Right - remembered something about python giving me very nice error messages (probably over wrong version or 32bit vs 64bit) - along with pretty clear help on how to fix things. Just didn't remember exactly what small task (hit "y"/download+install - or set up env vars) I had to do to get everything to work. I do remember it was (for windows and c compilers) very easy.

I'm glad I'm not the only one that uses IPython as a calculator. I might have to revisit trying to get it working in windows 8.

I confess, I've only dabbled with venvs on windows (had to play along with the wonderful django tutorial created by/for djangogirls[1]). But my secret to working with pip on windows have been invoking it from inside python: install python (optionally set up a venv); then:

  import pip
  pip.main("install ipython".split())

of course, python for windows drops pip in the scrips-folder -- but doing everything from inside python is magically cross-platform :)

Pip will drop ipython in the scripts-folder too -- so that where one can grab a shortcut. Or just (after restarting python):

  import IPython
  IPython.start_ipython() # Ed: not .start()

[1] http://tutorial.djangogirls.org/