How to open a vcproj file from Eclipse CDT ?

Question

I know, the question has already been asked but the answer doesn't meet my requirements.

So is there is any way to import a Visual Studio project with all its parameters in Eclipse CDT ? If yes, how could I do that ?

If you want to know more details about my situation, there it is :

I am joining a rather big collaborative C++ project, with a complex repository and many sub-projects. Each of these sub-projects was initially developed with Visual Studio, and the parameters of the build chain are stored in a vcproj file.

Yet, I strongly resent the use of Visual Studio, am more efficient with Eclipse CDT, and don't have access to a Windows machine, so I would be really happy to not loose weeks in order to understand the whole building process...

Answer 1

With the risk of being a detracted answer from your question, I believe that the solution is NOT to convert a vcproj to an EClipse CDT project. You should use a better build toolchain (e.g. CMake). Once such a toolchain is in place, you can create a Visual Studio project, an EClipse CDT project, a QtCreator project, a XCode project, ... from the same build configuration files.

That way, when the next IDE for C++ comes along, nobody will be wasting their time converting project files.

Answer 2

I think you're asking the wrong question. As you've found, the .vcproj describes the build process (in addition to the list of files), and that strongly depends on the MS compiler toolchain being available.

A better alternative (though harder to implement late in the lifetime of a project) is to use free tools such as Premake and JamPlus (just to name a few) to decouple the list of files from the build process. This is especially useful for multiplatform projects, as each developer can use their preferred editor and toolchain to contribute to the project.

That being said, I do believe Visual Studio can run under Wine... ;)