Hi Peter,

>Is there a released coda development environment for win32?

For userland, the entire souces are available on the coda ftp server.
For the kernel module, we are working on making that available.  I
should be able to announce that in the near future.

> I see the
>cygwin ported of coda, but I like to run coda in the native environment (a
>native venus verus cygwin venus). 

The reason is that coda (and lwp, rpc2, and rvm) were developed in a
UNIX environment.   The easiest way to port coda to Windows was by using
the "UNIX environment" of cygwin.

You may try to use visual studio, but I believe you will be in for a
long and very hard process.  A possibly easier way is to see if you
can get the compiles and links working with the -nocygwin flag.  That
would remove the requirement of using the cygwin.dll.  But again, I
suspect that it would take a major rewrite of the system to get it
compiling without cygwin.

In case you want to try, I suggest you start with lwp.  Then, once you
get a cygwin free lwp, next move to rvm and then rpc2.  Once all three
libraries are cygwin free, you can then start on the major part of the
job .... coda userland.

>I assume during the file system
>development, there must exist a development environment.  Any tips are
>greatly appreciated.

Well, yes there was a development environment.  I used UNIX, NetBSD
and Solaris to be specific.  I also used Cygwin (sometimes over sshd),
so it felt like a UNIX environment.  (More recently, with the port of
XFree86 to cygwin, one can now use many of the UNIX X tools under
cygwin.)  The only part that required microsoft tools was the actual
kernel module compile.  And for kernel code, visual studio can not be
used.  One must use the command line access to the C and C++ compilers
in visual studio.  emacs is the editor I used, both on Windows and 
all UNIX platforms.

By the way, I used samba on a NetBSD system for file sharing.  All
my source code was on the NetBSD system, including all the kernel
code.

Of course, debugging was done by running the software on Windows.

I hope this answers your questions.

--Phil

-- 
Phil Nelson                       NetBSD: http://www.netbsd.org
e-mail: phil@cs.wwu.edu           Coda: http://www.coda.cs.cmu.edu
http://cs.wwu.edu/faculty/nelson