I beg to differ, trump. There are tons of free compilers out there for windows. I know linux. I had a linux server till the mboard died. But still I know the innerds of the bloated windows nightmare a great deal better
You mentioned two very good free compilers that are pertinent to this topic. Dev-cpp can do everything cl.exe can.
You know what would help, devs? Would you mind taking some time to just dump out a dev-cpp compatible makefile? The rest I'd do. I'm a programmer by trade. And using cmake? or some similer tool, or maybe the project export thingy in vs.net could do the job. The makefile. that comes in the cvs release is just a linux-compatible type makefile, if I read it rightly. My point is, yes you guys do this for free, on your own time, and have other priorities. But then again, you're *good* at what you do and doing a makefile that'd work for the rest of the world wouldn't take much time to do. Minutes, probably. You don't have to test the thing. And of course leave it unsupported since you need to stay on the best beast that keeps you so productive (vs.net).
On a side note, I'd be willing to throw in coding ideas, snippets of optimized what-not, once I got started and got familiar with your code. Currently, I haven't bothered to get that involved because I spent several hours spinning my wheels trying to make sense of the vs.net project file wierdness. I know assembler fairly well, btw, and I imagine I could speed up a few funcs here and there. I just don't know vs.net's environment at all, and know .net only to an intermediate level.
Anywhoo, a non-vs.net makefile would help kickstart a lot of folks - either to doing their own servers properly, or to get a working beast and then start offering ideas to improve the code, the db, whatever.
Good job, keep it up, cya around...