How can I create Debian install packages in Windows for a Visual Studio project?

Question

I'm developing some cross platform software targeting Mono under Visual Studio and would like to be able to build the installers for Windows and Linux (Ubuntu specifically) with a single button click. I figure I could do it by calling cygwin from a post-build event, but I was hoping for at best a Visual Studio plugin or at worst a more Windows-native way of doing it. It seems like the package format is fairly simple and this must be a common need.

edit: Re-asked question under other account due to duplicate login issue.

Answer 1

Debian's .deb packages are just "ar" archives containing tarballs. You can manipulate both types of files using cygwin or msys quite easily:

$ ar xv asciidoc_8.2.1-2_all.deb 
x - debian-binary
x - control.tar.gz
x - data.tar.gz

$ tar -tzf control.tar.gz 
./
./conffiles
./md5sums
./control

Or you can install all the "standard" Debian stuff using cygwin, I suppose, but most of that stuff won't benefit you much if you're building a .Net app anyway.