some windows stuff worth knowing.

• This page tells you how to get free copies of the command line development tools that are including in Visual Studio. That's right, get yourself the C/C++ compiler and header files (as well as some batch scripts to set up your environment properly), all direct from Microsoft.




• .NET Framework SDK (for the compiler and linker).


• Platform SDK (for the header files).


• As a side note to this, I had to learn about the call statement for DOS Batch scripts in order to learn how to make a batch file that would call each of the batch files in sequence, because each of the above SDK has a different batch file to set up the environment.




• This page tells you how to edit the Windows Registry to change the behavior of the Caps Lock key. For a Emacs user like me, this was a crucial thing to learn, since the control key is really hard to get at on modern Windows laptops. Speaking of which . . .


• This page tells you how to install Emacs on a Windows machine. It works well enough.


• Cygwin. Nuff said.