Let me explain for the idiots: when I develop on my Ubuntu box, I don't need to buy a second Windows machine, sign up with Canonical, and download a 9000 jiggibyte proprietary 'SDK toolkit'. I just type 'apt-get install build-essential' and type away my code. It just works. Moreover: I can download any old random .tar.gz off the Internet, unpack it, run 'configure' and 'make' and expect it to work out of the box. That is what a true ecosystem looks like.
apt-get build-dep <package> dpkg-buildpackage -b -d -nc