They're sort of trying to work on this, see https://github.com/Microsoft/vcpkg https://github.com/Microsoft/vcpkg. If things are strictly C++ and build using cm

They're sort of trying to work on this, see https://github.com/Microsoft/vcpkg https://github.com/Microsoft/vcpkg. If things are strictly C++ and build using cmake, then MSVC is okay. Anything autotools or relying on inline assembly or overly complicated makefiles or scientific code that still depends on Fortran numerical libraries is a mess though. Much easier to use mingw-w64 gcc for those - bonus is you can cross compile and not have to do dev on Windows, just test the binaries.