Thank you for the excellent distutils tool!

Two problems:

First, this error message is emitted on win32, but it
appears to be incorrect, inasmuch as the Microsoft
compiler is not actually required:

"""
error: Python was built with version 7.1 of Visual
Studio, and extensions need to be built with the same
version of the compiler, but it isn't installed.
Error: Subprocess exited with result 1 for project core
"""

Second, the usage of distutils is somewhat confusing,
as the following line emits that error message:

./setup.py build -c mingw32; ./setup.py install

but the following line, which I intuitively believed to
be equivalent at first, works to compile and install
the package:

./setup.py build -c mingw32 install

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Whoo!  Progress!  Now it no longer spuriously claims that
Visual C++ is required for building extensions for Python,
and instead it spuriously claims that the .NET SDK is
required for building extensions for Python!

"""
error: The .NET Framework SDK needs to be installed before
building extensions for Python.
"""

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Changing this from category Distutils to category Windows.

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What would you like to say the error message instead?

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How about:

"""
error: Python was built with version 7.1 of Visual
Studio, and extensions need to be built with a compiler that
can generate compatible binaries.  Some versions of gcc can
produce compatible binaries if given the "-mno-cygwin" flag.
 Distutils will pass the "-mno-cygwin" flag to gcc if
distutils is given the "-c mingw32" flag to the "build" command.

Error: Subprocess exited with result 1 for project core
"""

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Thanks for the suggestion; I committed something similar as
r50979 and r50980.