Build a project targeting MSVC on linux Jenkins

Question

I have a private server that I've been slowly setting up for personal projects, but I've run into a bit of a roadblock. My server is running Arch linux [I like bleeding edge and minimalistic installs in situations like this] and I have Jenkins running on it so that I can have it automatically build projects. I have a project that I've been working on that is currently targeting the Win32/64 platform using MSVC, but I can't seem to find any info anywhere about setting up a job on Jenkins for this situation. I was hoping that I could maybe setup a Docker instance that would be able to provide the MSVC toolchain, especially since Visual Studio Code is available for Linux, and that I could use that as part of my Jenkins setup to generate Win binaries for me to test on my main machine. I mention this because naturally, Visual Studio is not a command line utility, and currently my server is a pure headless setup that only provides cli interaction, so if possible, I would like to avoid directly adding GUI packages to the server, but if it is the only way, I'd be willing to do so. Is there really no way to achieve what I'm going for with this?

Sorry if this lacks important details or is formatted poorly, this is my first time asking a question here as it's very rare for me to not be able to find the info I'm looking for in an already existing question.

Answer 1

After research, this is not currently possible as it stems from a misunderstanding of exactly what docker provides. Docker simply uses the underlying OS to provide everything and does not provide any virtualization of foreign OSs. Without a version of the MSVC toolchain that can run on linux, or possibly the use of WINE, there is not a way to achieve this short of a VM. Since WINE is not perfect, the most reliable solution as it appears to me is the VM, but YMMV. The other advantage to using a VM is that I can keep the server headless.