I need to use these windows tools as they have functionality I can't find anywhere else. But I would like to use gcc/mingw if possible as that is what I started the project with and I would like to stay as 'free' as possible.

But when I tried to compile in netbeans something that I got to build nicely with VS Express I got missing headers and when I tried to add those from other places (VS, mingw64) I got hundreds of new errors.

Should I be able to do it? Would it take a lot of work, should I just try to make libraries in VS and then use those in the gcc code?

EDIT: these are some of the includes,

#include <windows.h>
#include <atlbase.h>
#include <DXGITYPE.h>
#include <DXGI1_2.h>
#include <d3d11.h>
#include <Wincodec.h>
#include <vector>

Cheers

I was able to compile a very simple d3d11 hello world application using mingw-w64, but only 32-bit. If I compiled it for 64-bit it would just crash. I didn't really look into it much further because there isn't much out there. If you search Google for Directx 11 and Mingw the first two links are to my posts on Stackoverflow and Gamedev. There just isn't any effort being put into getting D3D10/11 working in the Mingw environment. So basically either use OpenGL if possible or use Microsoft's compiler.