For instance, it can generate Makefiles to be used with GCC and similar programs, like MinGW as well as Visual Studio projects. An in-source build puts them in your source tree. An out-of-source build puts them in a completely separate directory, so that your source tree is unchanged. Thus, it is a minimalist development environment for native Microsoft Windows applications more info on. It is basically a port of GCC on Windows along with all the useful tools accompaying GCC, the GNU Compiler Collection. Detailed installation instructions are available at. This tutorial will provide you with step-by-step instruction to install MinGW on Windows. MinGW is now installed on your computer, in particular GCC, G++, GDB and mingw32-make. Right-click Computer, then select Properties. Click Advanced system settings and then click Environment Variables. The top box shows your user settings, the bottom one the system settings. Warning You should not alter the system environment variable in any manner in the bottom box , or you will cause all sorts of problems for you and your computer! The next instructions depend on whether or not the User Path environment variable already exists. To check that the Path environment variable has been correctly modified, open Powershell and issue the following command, which issues the content of both the System and User Path environment variables: What is Microsoft Visual Studio? Visual Studio is an IDE Integrated Development Environment developed by Microsoft. It is used to develop computer programs for Windows. More info about Microsoft Visual Studio are available on the dedicated. For example, a web solution might consist of a web application project and a couple of C class-library projects. Actually, the Windows 8. What is the difference between Windows SDK, Visual Studio and MSVC? Microsoft Visual Studio is an IDE, i. Windows SDK is the set of tools used to actually build the software, providing tools, compilers, headers, libraries and code samples. Some Windows SDK components, but not all, are also included natively in Microsoft Visual Studio. Finally, MSVC is simply a shorthand for MicroSoft Visual C++, which was the name of the IDE before 2012. By the way, SDK means Software Development Kit and IDE stands for Integrated Development Environment. You may be asked to login with your Microsoft account in order to download Microsoft Visual Studio. If not already done, create a Microsoft account and login. More info and links are available on the Visual Studio download page. It will download and install Microsoft Visual Studio, the Windows SDK and the Microsoft. NET framework into your computer. With that software, you will be able to develop 32-bit and 64-bit applications for Windows. If you want, you can sign in with your Microsoft account to synchronize your settings across different computers. The compiler is cl. There are also other programs, like the linker link. When installing libraries like the Intel c TBB, you will need to know what is the version of your Visual C++ installation in order to correctly link the pre-built libraries. When you run cl. However, this is not this version number that will be used in pre-built packages. So, look at vc12 folder when linking pre-built libraries. Similarly, for Visual Studio 2010, the codename is vc10.