Here's some toys I put together to play with the platform SDK,
mingw32 and cygwin32.

Just like any other toy you find, this one comes with no waranty,
if it's broke you get to keep both parts. ;^)

Thank you to Cygnus Solutions for your efforts in porting 
the gcc development environment, and a special thank you
to Geoff Noer for putting up with all of the crazyness from the
gnu-win32 mailing list. Also thanks to Colin Peters, without
whos efforts gnu-win32 would still be a posix only toy.
You guys have given me many frustrating and enjoyable hours 
so now I return the favor, HA.

The purpose of this package is to compile unmodified win32 C code
using gcc, mostly it works pretty well, there are 90+ sample 
applications in the ../SAMPLES/ directory that will compile/link/run
under win95, and hopefully NT ;^) simply by creating Gmake Makefiles.
C++ code will compile with the win32 headers, but because of different
name mangleing conventions I know of no easy way to interface
with the C++ functions in the system dll's, you would have to use
the C interface, and I don't know how.

to use this you will need these packages

user-tools.exe 4.4M and cdk.exe 14M and optionally cdk-src.tar.gz 27M and 
user-tools-src.tar.gz 7.5M if you want to fix stuff.
from ftp.cygnus.com/pub/gnu-win32/latest/

mingsrc014.tar.gz 7k and mingw32_014.tar.gz 57k from 
> http://www.geocities.com/Tokyo/Towers/6162/gcc-extra.html
>
>or
>
> http://www.fu.is.saga-u.ac.jp/~colin/gcc-extra.html

platformsdk.exe 1.2M bldenv.exe 3.8M iSP3SDK.exe 1.8M and optionally 
platformbinall.exe 9.7M starting from www.microsoft.com/msdn/sdk/default.htm
and if you want the help compiler oledbsdk.exe 13M (not needed if you have vc++
I think)

You'll also need rsxntdj1.zip 880k (for rsrc.exe the resource linker)
That's also where I got the original patches that showed me how to "fix"
the SDK headers. use your nearest simtel mirror I believe it was in
/pub/simtel-vendors/djgpp/v2tk/ but it's been a while, so you might have to
archie for it.

And finally you will need to compile yourself a copy of /bin/ed.exe, I
got mine from a sunsite.unc.edu mirror out of a Slackware linux
distribution, .../a/bin/ed-0.2.tar.gz. this is for patching the SDK
headers, no context just the changes, so make sure you have these exact
versions of the platform SDK, or it won't work properly.

If that seems too much like work to you you might as will delete this
now, and go play some Quake, I guarantee it's a lot easier. 
(but not as much fun ;^)

What still here?

Ok, If your still curious, grab the source and binary tarballs for  mingw32,
put them somewhere out of the way, and type tar -vzxf mingsrc014.tar.gz 
cd into the .../src/mingw32 directory, and type tar -vzxf ../mingw32_014.tar.gz
that's assuming you have a working tar and gzip on your system, or you 
can use winzip, make sure you check Use Folder Names in the extract dialog box.

then cd into the mingw32 directory. and type     zcat SDK.dif.gz|patch -p0
(assuming you have a working patch and zcat(gzip -d -c), if not there's one in
cdk.exe or you can use djgpp's (I think) )

WARNING patch has a hard time creating new files in newly created directories
I don't know if this is a cygwin32 specific problem or what, but you may have
to create the "docs mspatch bin test_headers, and SAMPLES" directories, and
then cd into /mstools/SAMPLES, and do 
find . -type d -exec mkdir -p /usr/src/ming32/SAMPLES/\{\} \;
to get everything to patch cleanly, don't forget to do
remove the *.orig, or *.~1~ files

Magically a file named install.SDK will appear in the ../docs directory,
don't just take my word for it, type ls docs, and there it is!!!. read that.