MSVS is free for non-buniness use now and you can see the built-version downloads is mostly Windows, you know, any user would be the potential code contributor for a opensouce software, why not add support to the most dominant IDE on Windows platform?
and I knew quite some adblockers based on "modifies version" of privoxy on Windows ( some of them make great improvement on privoxy, closed-source at the moment though... like stream mode )
as the stream mode refer above, I don't know does it a proper word or not, below is based on what I seen by my own eyes and what I was told.
Privoxy will only send a file to client(browser) after it's fully transfered and filtered. That will make user feel "lag" when the connection is not good and the main HTML is big... The browser got nothing to parse and draw until whole file is downloaded. These stream mode things will pass the buffer to client on the fly.
Thanks for the suggestion, but the MSVS support was removed
because it was broken and unmaintained.
Someone familiar with MSVS shouldn't have too much trouble
bringing the MSVS support back, therefore it's not obvious
to me that the lack of MSVS support actually discourages
contributors.
Even before the MSVS support was removed, most of the
external code contributions came from users of Unix-based
operating systems.
Also note that the download statistics are skewed towards
platforms that force their users to collect their third-party
software all over the web instead of using a package manager.
Finally it sounds like those Privoxy-based adblockers you are
aware of are currently violating Privoxy's license which seems
to indicate that their developers aren't interested in
contributing to Privoxy anyway, with or without MSVS support.