It is very easy on Linux to fire-up vi and write a 100-200 lines of code, compile and see the results: ie. Trying small simple examples of C/C++ code.
On windows however, I like Visual Studio but to use it you have create a new solution then a project which then creates a new folder, generates very large PDB and caching files and a small example of 100-200 LOC becomes a 20Mb large project(?!) after compilation.
So the question is how do you write this kind of small codes on Windows? Possibly Cygwin or Dev-C++ (which is not active since 2004?).
You can compile from the command line using
cl.exe. See the MSDN article How to: Compile a Native C++ Program from the Command Line for detailed instructions.