That doesn't sound right. As far as I know masm is not installed on any of the normal test machines. gas would normally be the only available assembler.
Sidenote: Trying to compile it with VS will fail. I've tried to cross-compile the nettle assembler code for win32-PE on Unix for the two-machine setup, but unfortunately the semi-experimental win32PE support in upstream gas does not deliver something that VS is completely happy with. The normal win32 builds use a hand-compiled nettle done by someone at Roxen.