Porting a Windows App to Linux with Visual Studio
This tutorial displays how to dock a easy Windows application to Linux by conceiving a Linux configuration in a Visual Studio task with VisualGDB.Before we begin, ensure that VisualGDB 4.0 or later is installed.
- Now switch the current configuration back to Debug and
hit F5 to run the Windows version of your program:
- The last page allows specifying the location of the
source files on the Linux machine. You can proceed with the
default settings:
- On the next page select the Linux computer you want to
use. You can also select a different toolchain:
- VisualGDB will start the Linux Configuration Wizard.
Enter "LinuxDebug" as the configuration name:
- Our first step will be to create a simple console
application for Windows. Start Visual Studio and select File->New->Project.
- Select "Win32 Console Application":
- Proceed with the default settings and press "Finish".
Visual Studio will create a basic console application. Add
the following code to the main file:#include "stdafx.h"
#include <stdio.h> #include <stdlib.h>
int _tmain(int argc, _TCHAR* argv[])
{
printf("HOMEPATH=%s\n", getenv("HOMEPATH"));
printf("HOME=%s\n", getenv("HOME"));
return 0;
}
- Build the project. If the build complains about the
getenv() function, add the following line to the beginning
of stdafx.h:#define _CRT_SECURE_NO_WARNINGSRun the project and observe its output. Note that on Windows the HOME variable is undefined:
- Now we will create a new Linux configuration for the
project. Select Project->Add VisualGDB
Configuration->New Linux Configuration:
- When you press Finish, VisualGDB will create a new
project configuration and a corresponding solution
configuration. As certain Windows-specific files are
missing on the Linux machine, the compilation will fail with
several errors. We will fix them in the next steps:
- Open the stdafx.h file and remove references to SDKDDKVer.h and
tchar.h:
- Rename _tmain() to main()
and replace _TCHAR with char.
Build the project. You will notice that the modified source
files will be transferred to the Linux machine and built
there using GCC, the standard compiler on Linux systems:
- Set a breakpoint on the return
statement and run the program. Observe the output:
- As Windows and Linux use different variable names
(HOMEPATH vs HOME), we had to write two separate getenv() lines. Now we will add conditional
compilation statements to ensure that only one line is used
on each OS. We could test for the _MSC_VER
macro on Windows (that is set by the Visual C++ compiler) or
the LINUX macro that is defined by Linux
headers, however in this tutorial we will show how to add
your own macro. Right-click on the project, select VisualGDB
Project Properties and go to the Makefile Settings page. Add
BUILDING_FOR_LINUX to Preprocessor Macros:
- Now press OK and add the #ifndef
BUILDING_FOR_LINUX statement to your code. Build
and run the program. Observe that the output only contains
one line now:
- As most of the API (except for the basic standard
functions) is different between Linux and Windows, you may
want avoid having too many #ifdef
statements and simplify your porting. You can accomplish
this in one of the following ways:
- Use a multi-platform framework like QT that abstracts out the differences between platforms
- Install Cygwin and create a Cygwin configuration via Project->Add VisualGDB Configuration->Windows. Cygwin provides equivalents to most Linux APIs on Windows so once you have ported your app to Linux you can build the Windows version of it without too many changes
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