That's it. We're done. We can now build this as a shared library. The resulting DLL is now visible to Python. Here's a sample Python session:
>>> import hello_ext
>>> print hello_ext.greet()
hello, world
Next stop... Building your Hello World module from start to finish...
But of course it doesn't mention what to do with the .lib/.dll files you built in the previous steps, and how to actually 'register' them with python. The line "The resulting DLL is now visible to Python" just isn't working for me. I have the dll, but it's not somehow magically visible to python. I end up with:
Either copy the dll to the current directory (the directory from which you invoked python)
or add the directory containing the dll to the environment variable PYTHONPATH