Scalable Windows Development Environments?

spirality asks: "I've been developing under *NIX since I started writing software about ten years ago, and my company has been developing its product under *NIX since its inception. Until recently that is. We just completed the first Windows version of our product. Under Unix we used CVS with a custom build environment that we developed in house, and it simply can not be ported to Windows. What are Slashdot users, who must develop under Windows, using for a development environment?" "Though it does work under Cygwin, (this is how we got our port in place), it's simply not viable, as a simple compile/link cycle can sometimes take over an hour. We've begun to use Visual Studio, but have found that it lacks in many respects, especially when it comes to syncing project files among our developers. Obviously people are developing LOTS of Windows applications, and I can't imagine that everyone has a crippled development environment. What kinds of tools are used for source code revision, and especially what mode is Visual C++ used in? Given our dependence on third party libraries there is no way that we can avoid Visual C++, though use of the Microsoft IDE is not necessary. We have a team of about ten and are going to be adding more, so an environment that scales well is essential."

Comments

Cross compile!

[Jepler]

My day job is a large C++/tcl application with thousands of source files. We build for Unix and for Windows.

Version control is done via RCS. The build is a non-recursive Makefile with correct dependency-checking. Individual programmers do not have complete copies of the source tree, but can substitute their working files for trunk files when linking the binary.

We use distcc and cross-compilers to build all our platforms.

One build step uses wine to run a Windows program, and another build step invokes msvc++ v6 in wine to build a DLL related to some third-party C++ software.

Our open-source, third-party libraries are rebuilt by a separate non-recursive-makefile, also using distcc and cross-compilers.

The biggest current problem with the setup is that a do-nothing build takes about 10 seconds, build 1 object + link takes nearly 1 minute, and all compiles in the office are serialized since they write to the same repository of object files.

Anyway, in summary, keep the horror that is Windows development far away from you, and build your .EXE file using Open Source software on Unix. And get some other poor fellow to do the testing on Windows.