Npm packages need not only be written in JavaScript, they can also include native Node.js modules. Their sources need to be compiled when the package is installed on the local computer. Making that work in Windows can be a bit challenging.
Last week I was configuring the build server to compile its first Visual C++ 2010 project. I took the approach of using MsBuild on the project file (.vcxproj) as I am already doing it with the .NET projects. This worked just fine on my development machine with Visual Studio 2010 installed. It soon turned out not to be as easy as I expected it to be.
By switching from C# with P/Invoke calls to Managed C++ when implementing a managed wrapper for the ANSI C style library I stumbled upon, I wanted to avoid the tedious and error-prone task of writing the P/Invoke signatures for function calls and user-defined types for the structures they used. As a side result I also managed to avoid most of the advanced marshaling issues with complex data structures.
Trying to build a C++ project opened from a network share in Visual Studio 2005 might fail with a strange error. The problem only appears when the share host can't authenticate the user reading from and writing to the share.
Managed C++ is actually quite nice in the 2005 version. You probably still wouldn't want to use it if you could get away with C# or VB. But if platform invoke is giving you too many headaches, you might want to take a look at it.
As a part of the Artificial Intelligence and Symbolic Programming course at university me and a group of fellow students got involved in a project which tried to achieve sensible tactical behavior of a group of soldiers controlled by a human player at a higher abstraction level.