Visual C++ 6.0 as a Winelib IDE?

[Ira Krakow]

I have Visual C++ 6.0 running under Crossover Office
4.1, which of course means it's running under Wine. 
For one of the examples in the Wine/Winelib book, I
decided to take the code produced by the VC++ Win32
"Hello World" wizard and see how to port it to Wine.

Turns out, it's almost trivial.  Create an empty
directory, copy the *.c, *.rc, *.h, and *.ico files to
it.  VC++ produces tons of other files, but they're
either used to maintain the Visual Studio environment,
or are intermediate compilation files that aren't
needed.  Then run:

$ winemaker .

The Makefile that Winemaker generates _almost_ works. 
You need to delete the references to the mfc library
and mfc.dll.  After doing that, running make generates
the .so file.  Wine runs it flawlessly.

I got to thinking - can I convert the code from the
MFC application as easily?  Seems like it's doable,
because the generated code runs in VC++/Crossover
Office 4.1.  I tried the same steps as before, with
Winemaker, but I couldn't figure out what Makefile
modifications were needed.

All of this got me to thinking - could Wine running
Visual C++ be a viable IDE for porting?  Maybe just
linking VC++ with the Winelib libraries would do it. 
Maybe after tweaking Winemaker and publishing a HOWTO
we could show that this is a viable path?  It's
certainly easier than for Visual Studio developers and
could help attract them to Wine.

Another benefit - we could use the Visual C++ sample
programs as tests for Wine.  The programs might
exercise areas that haven't been tested thoroughly.

What do you think?

Ira