I'm not that experienced with C, but I've been happily hacking firmware on some hobby projects using WinAVR. I'm visually impaired so I prefer using make files and the command line, instead of a graphically confusing IDE.
Sometimes I want to thrash out an algorithm at the Windows console prompt, with a few printf statements to show me what's happening. But I don't want to install a native Windows variant of GCC and mess up my working WinAVR installation.
What's the best way to proceed?
i think http://www.cygwin.com/ would be a great choice.. you can install cygwin and then install gcc install cygwin. you can have all the unix tools if you want