>> "Without Visual Studio, which installs the C++ and .Net dev env, it's a pain to install anything which works out of the box in Windows."
On Mac don't you need to installed the Xcode command line tools before being able to do most dev stuff?
On Mac don't you need to installed the Xcode command line tools before being able to do most dev stuff?
I'm not too familiar with linux, but a year or two ago, I was trying to set up a rails development environment on a Ubuntu VM. I had quite a few challenges along the way, but one of them that I recall that confounded me for an hour or so was that I needed to install build-essentials, which was not documented in the guide I was using, nor was it marked as a dependency in whatever package I was actually trying to install.
When you install Visual Studio, generally it automatically installs anything you're missing, or at least tells you how to do it.