A long, long time ago, long before Ward came along and wrote the cmake build, I tried to get Windows DLLs out of mingw. I had some limited success, but in general, the whole thing was too fragile and I don't think anyone used it. It requires that the user install the mingw environment on their Windows machine, and this is a pretty high barrier for Visual Studio programmers.

Since then, we have the cmake builds, which are the approved way to build netCDF for windows. They build with visual studio and don't require that the Windows user know or use mingw.

I took all the mingw stuff out of the C library, but there is still some to be removed in the fortran library.