Many of you may have already done this.
For me it started out with a desire to compile robotics code from my flash drive.
MPLAB took up too much space, and required installation, so i said to hell with it.
I already had perl installed on my flash drive and a relatively organized directory structure for programming and running applications off my flash drive. I have a Programs Directory where i keep my programs, and rely heavily on bat files to make and open up my programs, whether that's running a c compiler or a Perl interpreter.
I added the mcc18 compiler to my programs directory.
then it began with the creation of a small perlscript that
-read a resource file in the current directory to:
--find location of mcc18.exe the compiler
--find location of mplink.exe the linker
-generated the batch commands to compile the .c files
-generated the batch commands to link the .o files + .lkr + .lib files
-created the batch file which could now be used without Perl
and this worked well for a good amount of time, I could now compile the micro controller code from my flash drive.
i figure from this i could easily create an IDE of some sort. so i did, simple IDE like program in Perl using Tk, relies on whichever text editor is specified in the resource file (which in my case was notepad2, I rather like notepad2).
Regardless this works well, and runs completely independently off my flash drive, taking up approximately 131 megabytes (Perl interpreter + compiler).
the IDE program is stored in my Perl\projects folder and runs from there. the program is called from a batch file in every Project Folder (the folder where all the .c, .h, .lkr, .lib files are stored)
I'm still improving it, though it is fully functional. Let me know what you think.