There is something I would like to input on this as well.
I am stationed 20 miles outside Charleston, SC and I don’t even get 3G on my phone until I head towards downtown Charleston. It isn’t available “almost anywhere”.
As for using Code::Blocks, I like that idea. Recent versions of VS have had rediculously horrible performance on my 4yr old machine (which I use for testing, cause I like to have faith that my stuff will serve well on older computers too) but Code::Blocks has always been fine.
I’d also like to note that mingw has recently released a gcc 4.4 version for win32, which has given me improved performance in a few areas.
Of course, Code::Blocks imports VS projects and switches between MSVC and GCC reasonably well anyway, so maintaining another project file in the repository just as a portable means of managing the win32 port might not be worth the effort anyway.