Have you looked at vcpkg? It's the simplest way to use third party libraries on Windows in my experience. Many popular open source libraries are supported out the box by vcpkg now.
I didn't but some of the libraries I needed at the time don't appear to be present. The reason I wanted to use C++ specifically was API hooking and the Windows ETW api. I don't see any of the projects like Detours present so unfortunately it wouldn't have helped me in this case.
It does look promising but because of the mess I'll probably gravitate to another language if I don't need to consume such a low level API.
