Visual studio is fine, but I really hate the fact that you need to go through the whole process of creating a project in order to compile a single source file. Is there any compiler on Windows that allows compilation directly from a directory?
Yes, for one there cl(compiler used by Visual Studio). Any semi-decent compiler will have a CLI, so any Windows C compiler from bccup to Digital Mars should do the trick.
cl
bcc
The gcc equivalent on Windows would be ... gcc.
I think the best answer is MinGW , which is minimalistic GNU for Windows.
Visual Studio , GCC. Visual Studio cl .
"GCC Windows", , , MinGW, mingw-w64
cygwin, GNU, Windows. gcc.
cygwin
gcc
http://sourceware.org/cygwin/ http://www.mingw.org/
Cygwin MinGW