objdump ELF and Windows

Question

I am fairly new to this subject, that is ELF and any Linux related stuff. I am trying to write an ELF file and would prefer to do it on WinXP.

My question is, can this be done with MS Visual Studio including the compilation? As far as my understanding goes, ELF files can not be compiled on Windows OSs. Well, at least that's what my Google research discovered to me. Do I have to setup a Linux OS and compile it there?

Can I use the objdumo (part of GNU binutils) to analyze any ELF file on WindowsXP?

Any help and links are very appreciated.

Answer 1

It may be possible to use the Visual Studio IDE with other tools invoked from custom build steps. However, I would not recommend doing it to compile binaries for other platforms that are not Microsoft based.

You could install Cygwin (with gcc/g++) to compile ELF binaries and configure Eclipse to use them. You might find some tips on how to do this on this thread.