Procees of porting a c++ Code from Unix to Wince

If your project is small and you are not planning to port it to other platforms in the future then it works like you mentioned in your question. If you want to port your code by keeping it linux compatible and maybe you want to port it to a lot of other platforms in the future then you should do it like this: First just refactorize the linux program. You should do that by putting crossplatform interfaces between the crossplatform and platform independent part of your program. You can do that in small steps and you can always test if the linux program still works or not. Making the whole porting in a big program and then parying for not too many crashes is not a good strategy. After creating the crossplatform interfaces (like ISocket, IFilesystem, IFileStream, ...) you can write the platform dependent implementation of these interfaces on the other platform. you can still make a lot of bugs and it might be a big piece of code to write, but you can write small tests for each interfaces and at least the crossplatform part of your code is operable for sure because you already tested it on the old platform while you were introducing the interfaces. This is true for proting from any platform to any other platform. It might make sense to specify platforms like linux to WinCe only if we are talking about a specific library like sockets, but it isnt always important even in those cases. Another thing that can make porting hard is different hardware limitations (slower cpu, less memory, ...), but in case of relatively simple programs that dont push the limits of the hardware this isnt so important. In case of hardware limitations sometimes you have to use totally different architectural solutions in your program. But again, in case of general user progs this isnt the case.