Headless install?

[sudoku]

I doubt that you can do Windows programming on Linux Alpine.

Not even running under Wine?

[fearless]

Most CI/CD providers have all the OS, toolchains, SDKs and compilers cached, so deploying them on a VM like a docker container doesnt really involve much downloading if any. Sure they can be configured to pull and update from latest sources from github or other locations, or they can be specifically forced to use particular versions of OS, toolchains or compilers.

Its really about convenience to automate the test, build and deploy mainly used by large companies and/or multiple coders using a source control/version control solution. But can of course be used by hobbyists/individual coders. Github and its Actions are just one example of a CI/CD provider in that sense, and they each probably offer different support for various development environments and tools.

So spinning up a docker container or VM with a specific windows OS and using a specific Visual Studio Installation and a specific version of a C/C++/C# compiler is fairly easy to do, along with any other OS and development toolchain you can think of. Its all done remotely on the CI/CD provider server. So its not really about downloading locally unless, as I mentioned in a prior post, you have specific requirements to do so for automating testing etc.

Uasm has a linux version, so could be included in a linux docker container, although I dont know how easy or hard it would be to setup and how easy it would be to compile for win x86/x64 using it - maybe someone has some knowledge of how that might be achieved.