The Rust BPF toolchain is not available for Windows.
This means that compiling Solana programs cannot be performed in a Windows development environment. The following software is required to set up and complete the Solana Pathway on a computer running the Microsoft Windows operating system:
BIOS-level hardware virtualization support must be enabled in the BIOS settings. For more information, refer to the Virtualization troubleshooting topic.
Enable the WSL2 feature on Windows. For detailed instructions, refer to the Microsoft documentation.
Run the command wsl from a cmd.exe or PowerShell terminal. Once you have logged in, install the Solana CLI with the command: sh -c "$(curl -sSfL https://release.solana.com/v1.7.11/install)"
It is also important to make sure your PATH in the WSL environment includes the location of the Solana release you have installed, such as :PATH="~/.local/share/solana/install/active_release/bin:$PATH"
More information on viewing and setting the PATH in Linux is available here.
Once WSL is installed and you can access it through the Windows command prompt, you can continue to follow the setup instructions for the Rust toolchain in the Solana Pathway. This will enable you to compile Solana programs on a computer running Microsoft Windows, within the WSL environment.