I've successfully generated .cc and .h files from a proto2 protobuf. I've also followed the directions at https://github.com/google/protobuf/tree/v2.6.1/vsprojects to create the lib to link against. I created a couple projects in visual studio and was able to create two executables for the addressbook example. Everything works as advertised.
I'm now looking at proto3, as it's likely I'll need support for objective-c. It's trivial to download the precompiled binaries to generate .cc and .h files, but I cannot figure out how to duplicate the above steps in windows to create a lib for me to link against. Has anyone else been able to do so? Thanks.