title: Using Visual Studio to develop for C++ for Unix
body: <p>Does anyone have battle stories to share trying to use Visual Studio to develop applications for Unix?  And I'm not talking using .NET with a Mono or Wine virtual platform running beneath.</p>
  
  <p>Our company has about 20 developers all running Windows XP/Vista and developing primarily for Linux &amp; Solaris.  Until recently we all logged into a main Linux server and modified/built code the good old fashioned way: Emacs, Vi, dtpad - take your pick.  Then someone said, "hey - we're living in the Dark Ages, we should be using an IDE".</p>
  
  <p>So we tried out a few and decided that Visual Studio was the only one that would meet our performance needs (yes, I'm sure that IDE X is a very nice IDE, but we chose VS).</p>
  
  <p>The problem is, how do you setup your environment to have the files available locally to VS, but also available to a build server?  We settled with writing a Visual Studio plugin - it writes our files locally and to the build server whenever we hit "Save" and we have a bit fat "sync" button that we can push when our files change on the server side (for when we update to the latest files from our source control server).  </p>
  
  <p>The plugin also uses Visual Studio's external build system feature that ultimately just ssh's into the build server and calls our local "make" utility (which is Boost Build v2 - has great dependency checking, but is <em>really</em> slow to start as a result i.e. 30-60 seconds to begin).  The results are piped back into Visual Studio so the developer can click on the error and be taken to the appropriate line of code (quite slick actually).  The build server uses GCC and cross-compiles all of our Solaris builds.</p>
  
  <p>But even after we've done all this, I can't help but sigh whenever I start to write code in Visual Studio.  I click a file, start typing, and VS chugs to catch up with me.</p>
  
  <p>Is there anything more annoying than having to stop and wait for your tools?  Are the benefits worth the frustration?</p>
  
  <p>Thoughts, stories, help?</p>