Protection against windows.h

windows.h contains a few #define macros in lowercase and it has caused major debugging headaches
currently: min, max, far, near, have all been addressed but only because they were already in use in the codebase

- [ ] add an #undef for every problematic #define in windows.h
- [ ] lookup if other headers in other places are subject to the same problem
- [ ] study the feasibility of ensuring we can't accidentally include dangerous headers without the protective wrappers