Develop Windows applications with Linux tools - linux

I like the Linux operating system and vim editor, but there are many companies that develop under Windows environment in Visual studio etc. There is a possibility that I will have to work for such a company in about a month.
I'd like to do my work on my Linux system and copy the files to them. I have experience with both developments and I found out that I don't want to work with MS products but I like programming and writing MS code is not such a pain.
Are you a similar developer? Could you give me some advice about your methodology to be most of the time on Linux platform, to create code and debug everything in vim on Linux and only when neccessary open Visual Studio with Windows forms and similar things and test the things that weren't possible to test in Linux environment?
I would see the work in creating small peaces of code on Linux, testing them and then move it to MS platform and integrate to the whole system. How do you debug and test your code? The development will be probably in C# or C++. I can't imagine Visual Basic.
Please write here your experience, style of work, if this has sence or there are too many troubles and I should rather give up.
So the question is: How to develop applications that run on Windows with Linux tools, without touching Visual Studio and browsing with Windows file manager etc.
thank you

Not sure, if this will help you or not but there is a Vim Emulation layer for Visual Studio 2010 called VsVim.
Check out : http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/59ca71b3-a4a3-46ca-8fe1-0e90e3f79329

If I were you I'd install MinGW or Cygwin on your windows machine and just use gvim/vim anyway (or maybe just use the Win32 vim).
VS is just a big editor. You'll be building with the microsoft compilers ( perhaps using msbuild or nmake ) but probably are going to have to accept that you can only debug windows things with VS ( unless you build for MinGW or Cygwin and use gcc and gdb)

You can use vim as a code editor, you can even stick on Linux when developing software for the .NET platform. The people behind the Mono make this happen. Mono is a software platform designed to allow developers to easily create cross platform applications. It is an open source implementation of Microsoft's .Net Framework based on the ECMA standards for C# and the Common Language Runtime.
You can stick to the editor of your liking and use the tools that come with Mono to compile your stuff. There is a IDE called Mono Develop, but compared to Visual Studio it is pretty basic... and compared to VIM it lacks simplicity.

C# projects are plain text files so it's easy enough to edit them over an SMB share in whatever editor you wish from anywhere the sysadmins let you.
Testing however will be difficult without going back to the windows machine, and while Mono implements the framework, it's still a different environment if you're targeting Windows.

Related

Does Visual Studio 2022 have the same ability to open a javascript/nodejs project folder in a WSL2 Linux as VS Code is able to do?

If I'm in my WSL2 Ubuntu filesystem I can simply navigate to a javascript/nodejs folder and type code . to open that project folder and thanks to VS Code's Remote extensions, I'm essentially remoting into the Linux environment and ready to code.
Now Visual Studio 2022 has been released, I was wondering if it too supports the same level of cross-platform IDE capability as VS Code?
How, for instance, when in my WSL2 Ubuntu project in Windows Terminal, can I open my javascript/nodejs project in the Linux filesystem using VS2022, or is this not supported because VS Code is the only cross-platform IDE that can do this?
So its not really possible to do how your thinking. The problem here is that you your not understanding the difference between a "Code Editor", and an "Integrated Development Environment (IDE)", which is totally understandable, as the line that separates the two has become blurred in recent years, and also a topic of debate. There was a far more explicit distinction between the 2 10-15 years ago, however, Microsoft has done a good job at separating the two, where JetBrains will release a piece of software that can be used as an IDE, but is more often than not, used as an editor, but will still call it an IDE, even though its not an IDE in a pure sense.
How is all this related to your question?
When you open your Node.js project in VSCode via the code . command, you are opening it in an editor that implements Intelli-code, as well as a wealth of other tools, but essentially, the editor, and all the tools extract the names & file extensions of your documents, parse them (usually turning much of the info into an AST, where many extensions will make use of that info to offer the various tooling capabilities/features. The point is at the end of the day, the editor just parses all of your code, gives you info, and you make any changes as needed to your code. And again, this is what your doing with code .
With Visual Studio 2022, you can't open a project with it, unless its a project type the IDE supports, and enables the IDE, to embed its-self into your project. This includes things like built in environment, built in cache, built in build system, the files needed to bootstrap its-self. With an IDE, the IDE is part of the project.
So then why does Visual Stdio 2022 work with Node?
It works with node, to create Node.js applications within a windows environment, and it offers the ability to access different Windows SDK features via Node. These are things you could never do using server-side Linux builds with Node. When you build a Cpp application for windows, you package the entire thing in a .sin file, I haven't built a windows app in node, but I know that Node also uses the .sin file build system, which requires Visual Studio & Windows SDK to do, and parts of Visual Studio/Windows to be embedded into the project, for the project to be able to work in a Windows OS, and take advantage of MS Windows features.
Long story short, V.S. Code is the right tool for what your doing, why would Microsoft invest in two identical tools any way? If you ever want to build something for Windows, or for MS mobile device using Node, you will probably want to change your environment, to VS2022.

Is there a cross platform desktop framework that would utilize native libraries such at .NET and Cocoa?

I am starting a project that is heavily graphics related (think, paint app with layers).
Anyway, I have a long history in C#, Java, JavaScript and Ruby. This application will be open source.
But what I'm looking for is a "build once, use everywhere" framework. Most of the platforms I've looked into either seem to be far too outdated, too complicated, or just not a right fit.
I've looked into Swing, WindowBuilder, wxRuby, etc. So many choices and none seem modern enough, have good documentation, etc.
I was a C# desktop developer for years so if I were targeting Windows only, I would go that route easily. But I want my app to run on Macs too. But, I would like the Mac version to look like it was designed for a Mac and the Windows version designed for Windows, etc. I'm looking at the Mono Project currently. But the idea of my Mac users installing Mono doesn't appeal to me.
Anything Ruby based would be cool but not required.
Anyway, what are some recommendations? I use NetBeans, Eclipse and Visual Studio. So I'm not concerned with learning new IDE's if I had to. I even thought about doing it all in JavaScript and using the canvas but since I need to work with large, local binary files, I didn't know if that would be a good option.
Thanks for any suggestions.
Real Studio can create cross-platform desktop apps for OS X, Windows and Linux. It can also create Cocoa apps and you can use it to interface with Cocoa directly when needed.
However, Real Studio creates Win32 apps, not .NET apps so you cannot directly interface with .NET libraries.

is it possible to use a visual studio 2010 c++ code on a linux machine?

Newbie here. I made a project in visual studio 2010, and it works perfectly. Now i need to compile and run this code in a machine that runs ubuntu. Is there some export/import method, or how does it work (of course assuming such thing is possible).
What i am thinking is making a makefile in visual studio, then take the code and compile it in ubuntu? does such thing make sense?
Thank you in advance.
In an ideal world, the code is independent of any IDE or build chain, which keeps its own metadata saparate. Windows doesn't play nice with Linux.
On the other hand if you set up your project with CMake or something like that, then you can generate Visual Studio projects for a given code base just as easily as Linux makefiles.
You shouldn't need to change much code itself. Or, at least you should be aware of what is windows-specific. You probably will have to expend some effort in creating your CMakeList.txt or whatever you end up using, but it's pretty easy once you're familiar with it.
If you mean take Visual Studio source code and compile it on Linux: the answer is yes, though there may be anywhere from zero to a lot of work to make the code compile properly and run. It all depends on programming choices. Unfortunately, standard practice with Visual Studio generally is to use the most Microsoft-specific API features, thus greatly complicating porting to a POSIX or Linux environment. It is possible to make most non-GUI choices very portable, however a GUI intensive program is the least portable unless a cross-platform GUI API is used.
If you mean take the resulting .exe file output from Visual Studio and run that on Linux, that is usually much easier. Install the Wine package, (yum install wine or whatever the Ubuntu equivalent is) and fire up the program with wine program.exe. I have had very good luck (98+%) running Windows programs this way. The major exceptions are Microsoft software: in particular Visual Studio uses many non-standard Windows API operations, so much so that the Wine developers call VS's support level "garbage", a surprising outlier considering the number of Windows games which are well behaved and run under Wine straight out of the box.

What is Cygwin and how to use it in relation in Android NDK

Hi I am new to android NDK Devlopment.I downloaded Android NDK 4 for windows.I read through the docs.But i am not clear with it.
First thing is that,I want to develop the native file which may be c 0r c++.I think Using Cygwin will come to play.I dont have any idea or how to use cygwin .From the Docs i just read Cygwin is required for Windows platform.Apart from it ,i dont have any knowledge about it.
Not yet started with NDK Concepts.Help Required
Cygwin is a way to make Windows support some linux functionality. If you install cygwin on your windows machine you'd be able to run some linux software on windows (you'd have to recompile it especially for cygwin though). You can find it and more information about it here. There's also a good explanation at the wiki page here.
If the Android NDK needs it I suppose the Android NDK needs some linux functionality or tools to work properly. The other option might be to install Linux on a machine and run the Android NDK on there, it might be better since I assume Linux is the native environment for Android NDK development.
Since you're saying that you're a bit unclear about the NDK, you should probably be aware that as far as I understand you can not build a whole Android app using it, you can only develop bits of it, you will still need to develop at least part of the app to run on top of the Dalvik virtual machine, which, as far as I know, means that you'll have to write that bit in Java. In general I think that you should develop Android apps only in Java unless there is a specific reason to build certain parts of it using the NDK.
From wiki:
Cygwin (pronounced /ˈsɪɡwɪn/,[2] SIG-win) is a Unix-like environment and command-line interface for Microsoft Windows. Cygwin provides native integration of Windows-based applications, data, and other system resources with applications, software tools, and data of the Unix-like environment. Thus it is possible to launch Windows applications from the Cygwin environment, as well as to use Cygwin tools and applications within the Windows operating context.
Cygwin consists of two parts: a Dynamic-link library (DLL) as an API compatibility layer providing a substantial part of the POSIX API functionality, and an extensive collection of software tools and applications that provide a Unix-like look and feel.
So, Cygwin is a set of tools which allows you to emulate a unix-like (or linux) environment on your windows machines.
The NDK is the Android Native Development Kit. It allows you to write parts of your application in native code (C/C++) and integrate them into your application. Your application still runs under the Dalvik VM but it can load shared objects creating using a cross compiler. The NDK contains all the necessary tools and build scripts to generate native code binaries. It's an advanced concept and one you should probably wait on until you fully understand the architecture.
The reason why it requires Cygwin (or some flavor of linux) is because it uses GnuMake and other linux tools such as awk or Nawk. These tools are not available (or are really hard to use) on windows platforms, hence the need for at least Cygwin (though I would advise you do yourself a favor and just install linux).

web developer tools linux

I started using Linux for PHP web development. What is a helpful toolset to use for web development (mostly PHP) available for the Linux platform. My Current IDE is netbeans and I am happy with it.
In no particular order, my perfect environment consists of:
vim - text editing
git - version control
screen - terminal management
This is all you really need to build a great app in any language, for that matter (baseline). Every language has its specifics, but the above will more than get you started.
The PDT project provides a PHP
Development Tools framework for the
Eclipse platform. This project
encompasses all development components
necessary to develop PHP and
facilitate extensibility. It leverages
the existing Web Tools Platform (WTP)
and Dynamic Languages Toolkit (DLTK)
in providing developers with PHP
capabilities.
You can have a try for eclipse.
http://www.eclipse.org/pdt/
Another one not mentioned in this thread (suitable for PHP and a lot of other dynamic languages):
Komodo Edit (free version of the Komodo IDE)
I really like using Netbeans and SqlSquirrel. Both of these tools are written in Java and they are cross platform compatible. Also an odd note about SqlSquirrel: It uses the Netbeans editor. Also, if you like there are many tutorials and articles on using PHP with Netbeans on their site. Overall, go with the toolset that you like the most. There isn't a single toolset that works with everyone, and for all problems.
I like Eclipse PDT, and it can be used both on Windows (which I use at work) and on Linux (which I use at home).
Features are quite the same as netbeans, I'd say ; especially, you've got nice stuff like graphical debugging, when used with Xdebug.
I'd say that, these days, when it comes to a modern full-IDE for PHP, that works on Linux, and is free, there are two choices : netbeans and Eclipse PDT. Which one you prefer is generally a matter of taste, as far as I can tell.
If you're happy with NetBeans, stick to that as you IDE. Learn to use Vim or emacs just for common knowledge. Use version control, Subversion and git are good choices.
The power of linux is in the command line. Whatever you do outside the IDE, learn to do it with command line. After a while you'll be comfortable with it and you'll discover that there's bunch of stuff you never want to do with GUIs anymore :)

Resources