On 5/29/06, Dan Kegel dank@kegel.com wrote:
I'd like one goal of 1.0 to be "make Windows developers take Wine seriously." To achieve that, I think 1.0 has to support at least some Microsoft development tools well, including their IDEs and debuggers. It's probably unreasonable to require 1.0 to support .NET, so maybe supporting the last pre-.NET versions of Visual C++ (6.2?) and Visual Basic (6.0?) would be a good goal.
In support of the idea that people will dismiss Wine until it can run the VB IDE, here are a couple references on the web:
http://penguinpetes.com/b2evo/index.php?title=trying_out_picassa_for_linux "... they will continue to dismiss the Linux platform as being no good for programming until it hosts Microsoft Visual Basic."
http://www.novell.com/coolsolutions/feature/11246.html "Using Wine/CrossOver Office was an attractive option, but in a lot of ways it didn't solve the problem for the long term. Yes, I could get the application as it was compiled to run on Linux, most likely. But I had concerns about how to handle any fixes that might be required in the future. I would still need to have a Windows desktop to run the Visual Basic development environment."
These are only two voices, but I bet they speak for a lot of people. - Dan