The biggest issue when cross-compiling is to first make sure that the code is compatible. If you you're using the Microsoft Frustration Classes or other Windows-specific include files and libraries, you're in for trouble. If you wrote for vanilla Unix/ANSI C/C++
you should be pretty much OK. There are some portable UI packages that allow you to write GUI code that can be made to run on both Windows and Linux.
The CMake files generated by Visual Studio are basically dumps of the Visual Studio compiler environment. As I recall, they can be rather muddy compared to creating a makefile from scratch.
Unlike Ernest, my enthusiasm for Make
versus Ant is a little more tempered. I'd been using make heavily for a LONG time before I discovered Ant, but once I made friends with Ant, I gave up using Make for Java builds. Ant is easier to work with on Java projects, and the builds are easy to make OS-independent. Make is a little less abstract on some things, and as a result, it requires a little more work to make makefiles OS-independent. Also, since Ant's core tasks are Java-savvy, they make it easier to deal with some of the complex directory structures that you get in Java. However, Ant is more cumbersome than Make for C code.