Slashdot Mirror
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."
Since Borlands happy diversion with Kylix (happy for me) they have started taking the development process seriously and I think you should take a look at their product lifecyle tools.
http://www.borland.com/
They are taking very seriously the need for managing projects in all aspects.
Get an account manager to come and visit you and see what they suggest.
I had the speil a while back (2 years ago) but at the time it wasn't quite mature enough for the mobile patforms I was developing for, but I was impressed with the direction they were taking
Sam
blog.sam.liddicott.com
For cvs management, we use TortoiseCVS (http://www.tortoisecvs.org/). You can use Dev-C++ if you do not want to use Visual studio (http://sourceforge.net/projects/dev-cpp/) and you can use wxWidgets(wxWindows) if you want to develop cross platform GUIs (http://www.wxwidgets.org/)
My day job is a large C++/tcl application with thousands of source files. We build for Unix and for Windows.
.EXE file using Open Source software on Unix. And get some other poor fellow to do the testing on 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
At my current place of employment we use Perforce for source control with their Visual Studio plugin. We use Visual Studio 2003 as our IDE and their compiler. Our project is about 1 million lines of code at the moment, so we use IncrediBuild for distributed compilation on development machines. It works similar to distcc. We use a bunch of Lua to launch builds on our build/"continous integration" machine.
At my previous place of employment we used Perforce and Visual Studio with Intel's compiler. And a bunch of Perl scripts to launch builds on our build machine.
What exactly are you having problems with?
Now.. build system. How about something modern, cross-platform, that used Python scripts to control the build process...Sweet! I guess I'm all set then! Here's how you can get all of the above - for free:
* Scons build system (requires Python to be installed first).
* Subversion (SVN) version control system.
* Visual C++ 2003 Optimizing Compiler with the Windows Platform SDK.
* Microsoft Developer Network - free documentation and API reference (although this should be included in the platform SDK above).
* TortoiseSVN - a nice front-end to SVN on Windows. Included with the SVN installer by default.
* TortoiseMerge is included with TortoiseSVN, but you might also want to try WinMerge as an excellent stand-alone merge utility.
For editing code, you can use anything from Notepad to Edit to Emacs. I most frequently use the Microsoft Visual Studio IDE, but I also sometimes use the editor that comes with the Pythonwin extension package for Python as it also does syntax highlighting for C / C++ code.
Also note that any new programmers you hire with "Visual Studio" experience will be expecting to use the IDE. If you don't use external build tools, The VC project files are nothing more than text, so they can be merged quite nicely if you take a little time and effort. If you're each working on lots of different sections of code (and are used to having your own makefiles for each section), you can build libraries - each library having it's own
try http://www.mingw.org/
it's a version of gcc that builds native windows code. and it cross-compiles from linux if you'd like.
US Citizen living abroad? Register to vote!