I think it would be a great enhancement to NetBeans the support of Microsoft's native toolchain (cl, link, libtool, nmake, cdb, rc etc). (of course, "unmanaged" only).

I see these advantages:

* Easier set-up -- People have problem when setting up Cygwin/MinGW. In particular, I see a lot of PATH problems and incorrect setup of the cygdrive workaround.

* Support for commercial API's -- I see it as a kind of "industry standard" to provide .LIB files (for dynamic or static linking) along with the headers.

These ones are more subjective:
* Faster compilation;
* Smaller binary footprint;