(We are using virtual machines with a preinstalled windows SDK quite successfully in lectures and exercises.) However, if all you want is compile on windows, without having to drag 20+ Gigabytes of IDE around, then the SDK is an option to consider. If you are only starting out learning C, then I would not recommend using the SDK for the reasons given in the comments to your question.

For windows 10 for example, the SDK can be found here: īe aware though, that the windows compiler cl.exe can be a bit tricky at times, and nmake is not what you expect when you only learned GNUmake. What version of the SDK you want depends on the system you are compiling on, but you will find all of them on the microsoft website. If you know what you are doing, this is what you want to use. It comes with all necessary libraries, header files, a compiler, nmake et cetera, and a handy shortcut for a preconfigured cmd.exe that puts all of these tools in your PATH. What you want is called the 'Windows SDK', wich contains everything you need to build applications on windows, except the IDE (Visual Studio).

Visual studio compiler c++