Help on VC (write once, port many) project

I need help with porting a USB configuration tool from a VC 2008 project. The customer was sold on the portable code on Window and be ported to Linux and Mac. The developer (another contractor) said "It's 80% done", just need porting. So, we need to spend the other

80% time to do the porting. The target is a USB embedded device, using WinAVR and LUFA.

I use to do this for a living, but got tired of the MS trap. VC 2008 is gone, but VC 2010 is here. We can download and reload the OS every month with the evaluation copy, pretend to be a student to buy for $150, or just pay $500.

I have VC 1995 (VC5), so we need to port the code back to the future. From there, we work on forking into Linux and Mac.

If you can port a VC 2008 / WX Widget / USB project from 2008 back to

1995, please contact me at snipped-for-privacy@live.com. You will get lots of free stuffs and perhaps some money to play with the stuffs.
Reply to
linnix
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Back to Vc5?

Ouch!

Vc6 was a stable, and is still handy for the odd bit of C/C++ on a netbook, but vc5 is going back a looong way.

You can't move to the free via studio 'c' version?

G
Reply to
Glyn Davies

y
e

VC5 is very stable for me. I still have lots of projects on it. Other people can still open the project with VC6, but the standard release should be VC5.

It will be a commerical product, so there is probably a catch for it. And knowing MS, it probably won't work on XP.

Reply to
linnix

I don't understand the problem. Do you think you'll need Windows Vista? VC

2010 is free and you can install it on Windows XP, which you can get for $20 from eBay.
--
Frank Buss, http://www.frank-buss.de
piano and more: http://www.youtube.com/user/frankbuss
Reply to
Frank Buss

y

Not Vista, but XP.

Free for 30 days.

Reply to
linnix

The 'Express' version is free in perpetuity and has the same compiler in it as the normal version. It's just got a dumbed down GUI.

It has no restrictions on commercial use.

-p

--
Paul Gotch
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Reply to
Paul Gotch

I can't remember when I last used VC5. But VC6 was the last good version of the Visual Studio series, very stable (with the latest service pack for it) and fast. Beginning with Visual Studio .NET and 2005 it was getting slower and more bloated. E.g. I don't use the F1 help for some API functions anymore, because I'm faster when I search it at Google, in combination with "MSDN", because the search engine at Microsoft sucks, too. Additional benefit: Google finds more interesting articles, e.g. if there are known problems with some functions, or better examples than available in MSDN.

But the GUI of the Visual Studio 2010 express version looks a bit more clean and not as slow, but I've tested it only for small projects so far. It has some nice and useful source code editor features, like better auto completion, automatic error checking while typing the code without compiling, code folding etc. Ok, Eclipse for Java has this already for some years, but good to have it for a good C++ IDE now, too.

--
Frank Buss, http://www.frank-buss.de
piano and more: http://www.youtube.com/user/frankbuss
Reply to
Frank Buss

The GUI possibly, but the compiler was terrible. VS 2003 was far better and 2005, 2008 and 2010 have been incremental improvements over that.

I generally completely ignore Visual Studio's build system and GUI. I drive the compiler using scons and edit using vim.

-p

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Paul Gotch
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Reply to
Paul Gotch

You are right, I can remember that there were some problems with some C++ constructs, but at least with Service Pack 6 for Visual Studio 6 it was really good. Of course, for some of the nice new C++0x features you'll need Visual Studio 2010, if you want to use VC at all. E.g. if you want to use Qt, the new Qt Creator IDE is very nice and doesn't need any Microsoft compiler.

You should give it a try. Better than KDevelop on Linux, which I like, too.

But SCons is useful anyway. I have tried it some time ago for testing my Lua Player (

formatting link
) on Playstation 3, PSP and Windows, and it was very easy to setup and compile projects, all from the same source.

--
Frank Buss, http://www.frank-buss.de
piano and more: http://www.youtube.com/user/frankbuss
Reply to
Frank Buss

If you are trying to write code that will be portable across Linux and Windows (and Mac, though I know less about that), then why not drop VC altogether? Use mingw for your C/C++ compiler, libusb / winlibusb for the usb connections, and wxWidgets for your gui and other cross-platform APIs. You don't even need a windows machine until you get to testing - you can cross-compile to mingw from within Linux (Fedora even has ready-made packages).

I haven't tried any of that in practice - but in theory it should work!

Personally I use Python + wxPython for cross-platform development, but I guess you don't want to add "port to another language" to your to-do list!

Reply to
David Brown

I've tried it over many different versions, I still don't like it and its build environment has been generally useless up until VS2010 when they threw it away and replaced it with MSBuild.

I still will only use it on Windows only projects. The majority of the projects I do are cross platform and it's just too much hassle to maintain multiple build environments.

-p

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Paul Gotch
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Reply to
Paul Gotch

Pardon the French, but I don't see how that conclusion is anything but bollocks.

What the heck do you think particular versions of a single development tool set would have to do with porting the code to a completely different platform?

Just take that code, and rebuild it with whatever Windows C or C++ compiler you happen to have. No "porting" of any consequence involved. That'll come later, when you actually do start moving the code outside of its current habitat.

If that code is so bad that it needs fixing just to run on a slightly different edition of the same compiler, odds are the majority of it isn't worth keeping at all. You would be better of just stashing it for reference and starting from scratch.

Reply to
Hans-Bernhard Bröker

ed

All versions of VC6 implemented a pre-standard version of templates. MS's policy is to avoid breaking code within a version, so templates were implemented as defined by the original VC6 release, which was before the release of the standard (and before a major change in the template specification), though all patches and updates. This was changed in VC7, where the (then finalized) standard C++98 templates were supported.

In short, if your C++ code depends on templates, especially those written by other people, you're going to have issues if you stick with VC6.

Reply to
robertwessel2

er

++

need

se

We don't need templates, but need apps wizard. VC9 express does not include apps wizard, so we might need the full version. If we base- line it to earlier VCs, people can always convert the project into newer one. But it doesn't work the other way.

Reply to
linnix

Ditto.

Cross development mingw32 packages are available on BSD and most Linux distros, just add the packages as required. You may have to copy the usb.dll's and headers into the lib/include tree, but if you are careful, you can build the windows and linux/Unix versions from the same source tree and make file (particularly if using gnu make).

Alternatively, you can re-write the application in a scripting language like Tcl/Tk, and factor out the stuff which is platform dependent.

I have, It works.

That's an option as well ...

Cheers, Rob Sciuk

Reply to
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