Unless you require more advanced features, MSVC supports __declspec(dllexport) (see https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/a90k134d.aspx).

I found Clang had quirks when I tried it last year on Windows (about a year ago now), such as C++ exceptions having little to no support. Also, I found most open source projects expected Visual Studio or GCC on Windows, if they had build scripts that supported Windows at all, which resulted in many headaches.

Regardless, Visual Studio's debugging features are much better than GDB on Windows. If anything, you should use Visual Studio for its debugging capabilities.

The last time I tried to get my cross-platform Allegro application to build in VS2015 I absolutely could not get it to work. Is there a good place to start looking for guidance?

My main reason for hating MSVC is that it is a terrible IDE compared to CodeBlocks, but I can't get the MSVC compiler to work with CB at least not last time I checked. :/

Wait, really? I could never get used to Code::Blocks IDE at all and MSVC is pretty much the only IDE I can work with productively at all, especially once I install Visual Assist. Admittedly, that plugin is quite expensive, but since you only need to buy it once (unless you want all updates), this was worth it to me. After having used that plugin once at work, I pretty much can't work without it anymore. It just saves you so much time doing trivial things. Code::Blocks, on the other hand, just always seemed way too basic for me and - for simple use - also too complex. I mean, it can't even be used without setting up the complete compiler toolchain yourself (unless I remember that wrong?), which for an average user is definitely too complicated. I don't know how much the IDE has changed over the last few years, though. There were also some rather nasty bugs back then. For example: Breakpoints in your application never fired if your project was saved in a path that contained spaces. Don't know why that was. Granted, Visual Studio also contains a ton of bugs (as probably every IDE does), but so far I at least didn't stumble upon any that prevented me from doing basic development.

In the end, I guess, it all comes down to what IDE you're used to. Visual Studio is what I work with most, so that's probably why it's the best IDE to me. If I had to work with Code::Blocks every day, I might eventually get used to it.

Yeah, that's one of the few important things that Visual Studio is actually missing natively. Luckily, Visual Assist adds a great and fast file search to Visual Studio, which simplifies things a lot. It also comes with a lot of other features (such as better auto completion or a great symbol search dialog), so you're not just paying for a missing features. Nevertheless you have a point. Visual Studio should have that natively. Even XCode has a file search like that natively, and XCode is total garbage.

Yeah, I think I remember what the problem was now. Back then, I was actually following an Allegro setup tutorial from the Wiki, and this tutorial for some reason made you set up the whole toolchain yourself. I don't know why that was, but that's probably what stuck with me.

Anyways, all this considered, I still consider Visual Studio to be a bit more friendly to beginners, and I personally think that all important project properties and settings are easy to find in Visual Studio. I remember that in Code::Blocks, I sometimes had to search quite a while to find some stuff I was looking for. Maybe it has advanced in this field as well, though.

Did you compile with -g before passing your junk to gdb ?

Visual Assist plus Atomineer Utils is heaven.

I've been using Visual Assist for about 6 years now and can't live without it. The rename/Create Impl. function(s) alone are amazing. Smart project-wide renames have saved me a ton of time.

In later versions of Visual Studio (2010, I think) the syntax/code highlighting is redundant though.

Yeah, but I kinda appreciate the fact that Visual Assist just uses the same coloring scheme across all versions of Visual Studio. This makes it easy to adjust when you have to switch between many different versions of Visual Studio regularly (which I have to do at work, thanks to certain console debuggers/compilers only including bindings for certain versions of Visual Studio). Being able to always instantly associate color with syntax really saves you a lot of adjustment time when switching between versions. Another benefit of Visual Assist's syntax highlighting and auto completion is that they both work in places where Visual Studio fails completely. Taking work as an example again: At work, we generate our Visual Studio projets with our own build system (lace). For some reason, on those generated projects, Visual Studio's auto completion and syntax highlighting just fail completely (almost the whole text appears in default text color). Visual Assist still works fine on those projects, though, and offers you both: Great and functional auto completion and reliable syntax highlighting. It would be almost impossible to use those generated projects without Visual Assist.