cross platform (Score 1)

Writing Generic C++ could solve alot of your problems, but for certain things MS has done a good job with MFC. The company I work for writes code in Visual Studio using MFC and then uses a third party prorgram to compile the windows projects into solaris executables, etc. You can check it out here. http://www.bristol.com/crossplatform/index.html there are other progs available I'm sure but we get good results from this one. I have used it myself and get good results from it. I develop on windows2000 and eventually deploy to solaris8.