My ultimate goal is to scrap my Windows XP Pro laptop and install Red Hat v8.0 using Wine for those things that I might need to run from a Windows world.
OK, Wine will let you do that to some extent. If you want IE6 and Office 2000 right now it might be a good idea to get CrossOver Office, I tried several times to get IE working from WineHQ builds and never succeeded, but it worked first time with CrossOver. It's a time/effort thing.
As for VS.NET on wine, that's highly unlikely at the moment. I don't know if VS.NET is actually written in .NET or not, but either which way Windows compatability on Linux isn't advanced enough yet.
Bear in mind though that you can still develop for .NET on Linux by using Mono. They have a working C# compiler which spits out ECMA standard .net executables, quite a complete class library and they are busy getting System.Windows.Forms to work with Winelib. Alternatives to Visual Studio include SharpDevelop (doubt that would compile under Mono though) or simply using the native Linux apps such as emacs (i personally write all my code in xemacs) and using the command line. It sounds primitive, in reality it's far from it.
To be completely honest, I knew I was pushing when I asked for the Visual Studio IDE to run with Wine, however, that just goes to show how serious I am to scrap my dependency on the M$ products as a whole. And, even if it DID work, I would still need a clean Win32 OS running somewhere to be able to compile and package any applications.
Hmm, so you want to scrap your dependancy on Microsoft products but still use .NET, Visual Studio and still write Windows apps? ;)
Is there a list of applications that people have successfully installed and how they did it?
Yes, at appdb.winehq.org
Again, for Office 2000 and IE you'll for now be best advised imho to use CrossOver. It makes it much easier. I've personally got IE and WinZip working fine, Trillian kind of works but has several problems related to its bizarre window management. Bear in mind that if you're serious about dropping MS dependancies then you need to look into native apps, for instance Mozilla, FileRoller and Gaim would be close equivalents to those three. Using MS and Windows products on Linux isn't going to be a 100% happy experience right now.
thanks -mike