Should I cross-develop for Linux under Visual Studio

It seems that Visual Studio and the tools you can use it is far superior to Eclipse and other Linux-plat开发者_如何学Cforms.

So does it make sense to cross-develop for Linux under Visual Studio, as long as the code is much the same?

I assume that you can easily share files.

Of course it depends a lot of what you know and project setup, but for the later, importing to VS might be easier than importing into Eclipse.

This is actually possible, but only if you have the right infrastructure in place on both Windows and Linux (or some other *nix variety). I used to worke for an investment bank where almost all work was done on Windows with VC++ and then moved to Solaris and recompiled. This allowed us to use the far superior (over Solaris) Windows tools. And we are talking of building multi-tier, multi-threaded servers here.

However, in order to get this to work they had put in a massive effort (I would guess about 15 man-years) in terms of senior developer time. And it was kind of worth it because Solaris development tools are pants (but the Linux ones are actually quite good). It's not something you, as an individual developer are going to find particularly easy to do, unless you are writing generic command line utilities. In which case you can do it - I routinely recompile my Windows command-line projects on Linux.

The difficult part, in my opinion, is maintaining the separate build systems. If you start the project using Visual Studio you will be tempted to setup the project using the Visual Studio build system.

Don't do that.

Instead, I recommend trying CMake. Make the build system build using CMake, and then work from that starting point.

If I had to choose between Visual Studio and Emacs, I'd go with Emacs. The fact that Visual Studio seems superior to you is just because you got used to it and don't know how to do your usual workflow using other tools. Eclipse, after all, might not be the best choice for Windows developer to move to Linux. I'd also take a look at Qt Creator.