The only correct answer here is to pick one of the following: a) MinGW which is a port of GCC to Windows b) Cygwin which provides a Linux compatibility layer to Windows, and provides packages for GCC c) Clang is a compiler on par with (or exceeding the the quality of) GCC, but you'll need to compile it with something on Windows. If you are familiar with C, stick with C. Microsoft development tools are a nightmare, believe me. Stay very far away from Visual Studio garbage. d) The next best thing is Python. I'm not sure if it comes with built in support for very low level I/O. If not, it is trivial to write C functions callable from Python that do what you need. If you like C++, Boost C++ libraries provide a library for writing Python extensions in C++ that are absolutely amazing. Python is /the/ textbook perfect general purpose programming language. Extremely clean syntax and easy to learn as well. This comes from many years of experience and developing code written in C, C++, Python, and many other languages for systems including all Unix like OSes, and unfortunately Winbloze as well. If you can avoid Winbloze, use Debian or Arch Linux and save yourself the headache of Microsoft's mess. On Mon, Jan 20, 2014 at 3:45 PM, James Holland wrote: > > From: William Couture > > Subject: [OT] Where to start with simple Windows programming? > > > > Sorry if this is too off-topic, but this is a problem I can't ignore > > anymore. > > > > I've been using the same C compiler since the mid-1980's to write > whatever > > little utilities I need. Needless to say, it produces 16-bit DOS code. > --=20 http://www.piclist.com/techref/piclist PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist .