The Proper Way on Windows is a largely undocumented minefield strewn with broken glass and lack of a sane package managing system.
Personally, I require payment to even bother.
It's certainly better than: "use VS" or "suffer through any other sort of Windows dev" in my opinion.
- Default installation directories
- so Dependencies
Regarding your comment, there are many other ways to develop software for Windows besides VS.
>Regarding your comment, there are many other ways to develop software for Windows besides VS.
Uh huh, and as seen even... right here... it's normally a (relatively) major pain in the ass to orchestrate.
- Make use of a proper IDE like Code::Blocks
The thing is, that each operating system has it own way of doing things, and many people in open source tend to think that everywhere else should be like GNU/Linux.
I used to think like that, until I got the opportunity to work with several different types of operating systems, all UNIX flavours, Windows, OS/400, Symbian, VMS and see that there are many ways to do certain things.
Here is an example how someone else did a Windows based development environment for DCPU,