I know one can port a windows program over to linux

But what about the other way around, if we have a program here at work that someone has installed on a linux box is there a way to port that over to windows?

If they're not too busy and you ask nicely, perhaps a group like the GAIM developers would be able to point you in the right direction. Just look for apps that were linux native first and email the author. Its worth a shot, right?

Sure. If it is a C program all you need to do is re-write it pretty much from scratch using the windows API. Not a good option. I have heard that mono is good for writing windows apps on Linux...but I have not used it (nor do I code for windows!)

If the app is in a more portable language such as python all you may have to do is change filepaths etc...to windows format.

Can't really ask the authors of the program becuase it was written by someone here at work, thats the problem he left and they are asking me about getting the program to work on windows, and I am all like, "I dont know much about windows other then its a pain in the butt" So I will just tell work that they need to call this guy and have him rewrite the program on a win platform

Thanx very much for all those that replied

No, there are many C/C++ gui toolkits and graphics tookits that provide widgets or methods or creating windows. SDL is one that is good for games/graphics. But not GUI intensive apps. wxWindows, GTK(+), qt are examples. With them you can create an easily portable GUI you can compile on many different platforms with few changes. It all depends what they use, if they use straight X programming, or a lot of linux specific functions/libraries then it will require lots of modifications. There are lots of cross-platform libraries for a variety of uses. They could of course skip all this stuff and just program in Java.

If you have GUI code you would have to use linux libraries like GTK/XLIB

For functions like EnterCriticalSection, WaitForSingleObject or _beginthreadex you must write the code yourself by using the linux API (a nice tutorial can be found here).