Visual Studio Hacks

Jim Holmes writes "Microsoft's Visual Studio is an elephant of an IDE. It's got tremendous power and adaptability, but it's difficult to dig through all the less-than-helpful documentation. It's also very tough to figure out which of the many available add-on tools are worthwhile to add. Visual Studio Hacks by James Avery is a terrific reference for helping get the most out of Visual Studio." Read on for the rest of Holmes' review. Visual Studio Hacks author James Avery pages 512 publisher O'Reilly rating Outstanding reviewer Jim Holmes ISBN 0596008473 summary Get the most out of Microsoft's Visual Studio

Disclaimer: James is a friend who's helped me with starting a developers group, and I'm also working on an open source project with him. The possibility exists that I may work on a paying project with him at some time in the future; however, I haven't had any financial dealings with him so far. (Other than I still owe him a beer for coming to speak at one of our group's meetings.) For what it's worth, I spent my own money to buy this book from Amazon. End Disclaimer.

Avery's book is great both for new users of Visual Studio as well as the more experienced developer. Also, readers won't have to worry about buying a book which will be outdated when Microsoft releases its next version of Visual Studio in November. Tips and tricks are included for Visual Studio versions 2002, 2003, and 2005.

VS Hacks spreads 100 "hacks" across 13 sensibly delineated chapters. Each hack is clearly marked with its number in a blue box at the upper, outer corner of each page. Hacks are also marked with a thermometer icon representing the hack's relative complexity. One of my few complaints about the book is that the moderate and expert icons look too similar - but frankly I ignore these icons anyway, so the criticism's most likely wasted.

The introductory chapters on projects and solutions, navigation, and editor usage aren't introductory in skill level. Avery covers these topics in great depth, diving down to some useful, but less-than-obvious settings in VS's environment. Examples of this would include Hack #2: Master Assembly and Project References, where Avery shows how to add additional assemblies to the Add Reference dialog's list of .NET assemblies. This is a timesaver if you've got custom libraries you make frequent use of; adding the assemblies to the default list saves having to use the Browse button to search for the files every time you need to add them.

Some of the most uninteresting drudgework in development involves writing code for basic software elements such as business entities or data access layers. It's repetitive, it's template-like material, and it's boring. Documenting such work is every bit as tedious.

Hack #50 covers using CodeSmith to generate code via templates. Other hacks detail tying UML into the development process. Hack #81 covers using Visio for Enterprise Architects to generate code from UML diagrams. Hack #82 covers the opposite of that process: generating class diagrams via Visio's reverse engineering support. (UML's capable of much, much more than the simple drudgework of business entities or data access layers, and these hacks shouldn't be confused with anything more than a cursory introduction of how to tie UML via Visio into Visual Studio.)

One of the most useful sections is Chapter 5: "Debugging." This chapter focuses on getting the most out of Visual Studio's debugger capabilities. These hacks are critical helpers to good developers effectively use Visual Studio's debugger.

Avery covers the basics of setting up breakpoints, diving down to various options such as setting how often to break on specific break points, or setting conditional break points. He then moves on to troubleshooting breakpoints in Hack #37, and there's also great coverage on using Visual Studio to debug scripting code inside a browser session, working with SQL server, and attaching to a running process or one that's just about to crash.

I found the best content of this book in hacks focusing on making the most of tools both inside and out of Visual Studio. Hack #79 is a great section detailing how to stress test web applications using Visual Studio Enterprise Architect's Application Center Test. This hack makes it easy for readers to understand how to get detailed stress testing on a web application. Along this same line, Hack #80 shows how to make use of the Dotfuscator tool to obfuscate .NET assemblies to protect them from modest efforts at reverse engineering. (Like Java, .NET assemblies can be disassembled, revealing all your hard work and intellectual property.)

Other gems in this same arena include tools for running and debugging unit tests inside Visual Studio (#93), testing regular expressions (#100), and using tools which automatically generate documentation based on naming conventions in the source code (#69).

The mechanics of this book are great. The Table of Contents breaks down each chapter by its individual hacks, and the index is very detailed and clear. I also like how hacks are listed on the top of each page, making it quick to find something if you know the hack's number or name and don't want to fuss with the table of contents.

My sole complaint about the book (aside from the annoying thermometer icons I've already mentioned) is that it's not always clear which add on tools work with which version of Visual Studio.

The author maintains a website specifically for this book, complete with code and tool downloads. RSS feeds are also available to monitor any updates the author makes.

This book is a critical addition to the bookshelf for any developer who spends any amount of time working in Visual Studio. You'll become much more productive by using tips in the book, and you'll find tips to help you decide which add-on tools you'll want to make use of. More importantly, you'll understand how to get the most out of Visual Studio's capabilities.

You can purchase Visual Studio Hacks from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Comments

Visual Studio hacks?

[Saeed al-Sahaf]

Yes, I know a lot of Visual Studio hacks. Some say it's coders like them that are the problem with software today...

Re:Visual Studio hacks?

[stocholm]

I wonder how you link OSS and the usage of Visual Studio? I have made dozens of program with Visual Studio. Some of them were Closed Source - some were Open Source ... thankfully it is my choice to decide wether to make my code public or not (within some limitations of reverse engineering).

It is true that some of the HTML-code generated by Visual Studio is buggy (to put it lightly), but not all programming is focused on browsers and HTML.

:o)

Jesper Stocholm
http://stocholm.dk/

Interesting review

[WillAffleckUW]

although it does mention most of these hacks won't work when the new Visual Studio comes out.

But informative none the less.

Re:Interesting review

[teaDrunk]

What I understood was that almost all tips given by authot applies, irrespective of release.
Anyway, how different can VS2005 really be ? I would like to see some brief information on that (lazy to trudge through MS docs or other dev sites ;).

Re:Interesting review

[WillAffleckUW]

I was just saying what the review said. You'll have to disagree with the reviewer if you don't agree that most hacks may not work in the next version of Visual Studio.

I personally find that frequently, even if it's changed between versions, the hacks as mentioned are usually easily modifiable between versions, but you have to put a little thought into it and understand what has changed between versions, so they're not as easily modified, even though the basic principles may be useful.

I've got a copy of Visual Studio 2005 they gave me for a design panel on database tools at MSFT that I've yet to install, as I was waiting until I got my new laptop, but now that I have it, perhaps I'll install it and see if it is that different. Still got the shrinkwrap on it.

Re:Interesting review

[sykjoke]

What CBuilder Vista?

Re:Interesting review

[traskjd]

However it does also include hacks that will only work in Visual Studio 2005 so it's hardly only targetted at a single version. Well worth the buy.

  - JD

The "Hack" Culture

[yellowbkpk]

Is it just me or is a "hacking" culture growing out of the internet? People are getting fed up with the limitations put on them by business' slowness, so they push the limits of current technology to meet their needs.

Is this because people's needs are growing faster than industry's ability to provide them?

Re:The "Hack" Culture

[ilyaaohell]

It's probably more to do with the fact that you started reading Slashdot.

Re:The "Hack" Culture

[cybersaga]

Is this because people's needs are growing faster than industry's ability to provide them?

It's probably that often, the industry doesn't know what people's needs are.

Re:The "Hack" Culture

[I8TheWorm]

Is this because people's needs are growing faster than industry's ability to provide them?

Honestly, I can't remember a time when that wasn't true.

Re:The "Hack" Culture

[digidave]

No, it's just that every little lesser-known thing gets called a hack nowadays.

In this case, most of the "hacks" look like normal VS features that many people are unaware of. These sorts of things are better described as "tips", but that hardly draws any attention now, does it?

If it was called How To Boot Your Walkman With Emacs, now that would be a hack.

Re:The "Hack" Culture

[djfray]

Sorry, you mispelled "demands" as "needs"

Re:The "Hack" Culture

[Bingo Foo]

People have been biologically, intellectually, and emotionally unchanged for a very long time now. It stands to reason that our needs are also unchanged. Perhaps you meant "desires."

What, then, is industry providing? More desire. Who cares if they can't fulfill it, as long as the people believe that industry can fulfill it and keep relying on their "innovations."

Re:The "Hack" Culture

[NanoGator]

"Is this because people's needs are growing faster than industry's ability to provide them?"

This has ALWAYS been the case. The internet didn't cause it to happen. Once people understand how any given thing works, they find creative ways of taking advantage of it's nature. Sometimes immediate needs cause this sort of 'hack' to be found. Sometimes it's born out of a question like "What if we used it in this unusual way...?"

At best, the internet made these finds a lot more accessible. I'll happily agree with that. However, I can't help but think about Super Mario Bros. on the original NES. Long before the internet, people found inventive ways of gaining an advantage in that game. Heck, think about the Game Genie. Etc.

Re:The "Hack" Culture

[jo42]

I'm surprised they didn't call this "Visual Studio for Dummies" - or is the 'Dummies' fad finally over?

Re:The "Hack" Culture

[Bingo Foo]

I can recognize that my computer and internet connection are not "needs" without having a superstitious aversion to them. I've also lived, at times, without hot water. It was uncomfortable, but I lived through it and I was happy throughout.

I've never seen "FIght Club," so I'm not sure what that comment was about, but if you're getting your ideas of what my "anti-consumerism," or indeed any anti-consumerism really means from a Hollywood movie, perhaps you should be more circumspect. I'm not suggesting that there is a conspiracy, but from the very nature of the movie business I would expect a great deal of disinformation in any presentation they make on the subject of (anti-)consumerism.

So what is it about anti-consumerism that is "completely bogus?"

Re:The "Hack" Culture

[I8TheWorm]

Ok, you get the daunting task of correcting my manager when he tells me the user "needs" the interface changed by the end of the day.

Re:The "Hack" Culture

[peter hoffman]

As others have observed: need != want.

However...

Nearly 100% of all progress from the beginning of time has been the result satisfying wants not needs. People need: air, water, food, and shelter (basic functional clothing is nothing more than portable shelter and not needed in many climates). Each of those requirements has a basic level at which they can be satisfied that is very low.

Everything else is a want.

Since civilization is built on meeting wants, discovering new wants is not intrinsically a bad thing. Before something can be invented a want has to be discovered. It's not so much that "Necessity is the mother of invention" as "Want is the mother of invention".

What isn't a good thing is confusing wants with needs. This is something that happens all too often (as in "I need a big screen digital TV system otherwise I am oppressed, downtrodden, and discriminated against!").

Ultimate Killer App

[PaulQuinn]

MS Visual Studio is Microsoft's ultimate killer app. It's just the single best tool for software development. I use it even when developing for Linux.

Until Linux gets an IDE at least 75% as good as MSDev, top-notch large scale applications for Linux will remain few and far between.

Re:Ultimate Killer App

[Swamii]

I agree.

I think VS 2003 was lacking in a few areas, namely refactoring tools. Fortunately VS 2005 has refactoring tools integrated into it nicely.

Re:Ultimate Killer App

[ciroknight]

Totally Agreed. XCode's just the same way for the Mac.

I don't think a GUI platform can call itself complete until it's got an IDE that's worthy for programming.

The only one I've seen so far for Linux that's up to par (and just barely) is KDevelop, which is entirely useless to you if you don't use Qt, like myself.
And yes, I know about a lot of the alternatives, they just all suck so bad they aren't worthy of mentioning by name. Eclipse is better than most, but is java, and slow....

Re:Ultimate Killer App

[oniony]

Yup, let's just pretend Eclipse doesn't exist.

Re:Ultimate Killer App

[Tim C]

It's just the single best tool for software development.

I have to disagree there. My experience is mainly in Java development, but I have done some VC++ and VC#. In my experience, VS.NET 2003 simply doesn't compare to the likes of JBuilder and Eclipse in terms of features (and neither of them are perfect by any means). I'm not saying that it's a *bad* IDE, but every time I use it the lack of refactoring and code inspection tools drives me batshit insane in pretty short order.

To be perfectly honest, if you truly consider it to be "the single best tool for software development", then I have to seriously question the quality of the other tools that you've used. (But then, I've done my share of using make and gdb, so I can see where you're coming from if that's your level of comparison)

Re:Ultimate Killer App

[NoneExpected]

Visual Studio appears to actually be the killer app to my system.
I have a fairly decent system, but VS drives to incredible slowness.
When I exit I have to re-boot to get the speed back.
Does any one else have this issue?
Seriously I'd like to know.

Re:Ultimate Killer App

[oGMo]

I don't think a GUI platform can call itself complete until it's got an IDE that's worthy for programming.

I disagree... I'm not a fan of your monolithic IDEs at all. My GUI is an IDE:

• ROX-Filer, which is highly customizable and integrated with the shell
• XEmacs or vim as your preference goes, which are two highly advanced programmable editors
• bash, zsh, csh, or your other favorite shell
• autotools for building

These tools combine into an "IDE" that is my desktop. I have the best-in-class for every component. Beats a jack-of-all-trades IDE that lacks in any number of regards and takes huge resources.

Re:Ultimate Killer App

[AxemRed]

World of Warcraft is my killer app. //Read into that whatever you want.

Re:Ultimate Killer App

[swissmonkey]

One hint :

Go take a look at what Visual Studio can do, you will see many features(incredibly powerful Intellisense being only one of them) that will save you time and sweat.

This message provided courtesy of a programmer who used to be big fan of XEmacs et. all until he discovered what Visual Studio(and other good IDEs) can do.

Re:Ultimate Killer App

[Anonymous Coward]

>Until Linux gets an IDE at least 75% as good as
>MSDev, top-notch large scale applications for
>Linux will remain few and far between.

I don't understand why you were modded as insightful. I'm not trying to be sarcastic, but how precisely is MS Visual Studio a "killer app"? What makes it so impressive in your opinion that no Linux development environment compares with it, or
even as you say, "75%" as good?

For example, my development environment of choice is xemacs which I consider hands down the ultimate development environment because:

• It runs on every platform I care to use
  
• It allows me to set my choice of keyboard short cuts my way
  
• It doesn't require the use of a mouse in order to any of my choice of editing features,
  such as file open, save, write, insert, split screen, find, find/replace, capitalize, uppercase, lowercase, view info pages, open shells, fontify based on type my files, etc.
  
• It has an incredible array of features, not just limited to editing files, but also features such a loading/saving across networks, run various shells, allow me to save off entries in my programming diary (ChangeLog files for those not familiar), lets me choose my compilation command, etc.
  

Just being able to do so much without having to use the mouse is a victory in my mind. Having to use a mouse for any activity is defeat, because it requires a person to shift their visual focus from what they are supposed to be doing (editing scripts/programs) to looking for a mouse to do something and then have to move the focus back
to the editing. It's a cumulative loss of time that I find intolerable.

So could you please explain again it what way do you consider MS Visual Studio a superior product?

--Johnny

Re:Ultimate Killer App

[Swamii]

We have VS installed on hundreds of machines here at work, and I've never heard or seen anything like that.

Re:Ultimate Killer App

[RLiegh]

Until Linux gets an IDE at least 75% as good as MSDev,
You haven't tried kdevelop or anjuta then, I assume? Not being familiar with VS (too poor, lol) I am not sure how they stack up feature wise, but I bet that both meet your "75%" criteria.

top-notch large scale applications for Linux will remain few and far between.
You mean like Open Office, Mozilla or Blender3d? We have the apps; it's the mindshare we're lacking (if we're lacking anything, which I doubt now that we have corporate sponsorship from novell and ibm).

Re:Ultimate Killer App

[ciroknight]

Yeah well none of that can equal up to what a good IDE does. Just because you like to program in the shell, doesn't help those of us who like to program in the GUI.

Autotools are a crime when it comes to building projects.. I can't tell you how many hours I've spent tweaking those scripts until I heard about Scons, and it's not even an ideal solution; A good IDE allows you to click one button and have your software project built. Wanna customize the build? Don't worry about memorizing those archaic tags, simply click a checkbox and get everything you want.

And how about inline completion? A good debugger (GDB is alright, but once again, lots of fighting with archaic shell commands that you have to memorize, ugh)? There are just so many things a graphical utility can do to help someone that would require a million seperate tools.

In finality, when I'm developing, I like to block out other distractions; running a single application that takes up the entire desktop blocks out distractions and I get my work done faster. But that's my personal preference.

Re:Ultimate Killer App

[SolusSD]

i've been fairly impressed with kdevelop. have you tried it? I haven't used VS for awhile though.

Re:Ultimate Killer App

[EvanED]

How do you get an intellisense-like feature with (X)Emacs?

For me, a good intellisenseish feature in IDE A will cause me to use it over IDE B (without such a feature) in a heartbeat *no matter what* other feature IDE B has. I don't care if it runs like a dream, has the best debugger in the world, or whatever. If A has intellisense and B doesn't, about the only feature B could add that would make me switch is a telepathic "I'll write your code for you" feature.

Re:Ultimate Killer App

[yamla]

That's interesting, I approach things exactly in the opposite direction. I am developing for Windows but use Linux as my primary operating system. I use KDevelop and prefer it over Visual Studio (disclaimer: haven't tried VS2005). I just find too many things are missing from VS for my liking. Good svn integration, doxygen, good command-line tools like find and grep, sloccount, etc. etc. etc. Additionally, compiles are SLOW using Visual C++. Much much slower than in Linux when I use ccache and also distcc (though I'm not using distcc at the moment). Even without ccache and distcc, Linux still wins pretty handily because nmake STILL doesn't support parallel builds to take advantage of hyperthreading and multiple CPUs (though I'm not using those at the moment, either).

To each their own.

Re:Ultimate Killer App

[Lally Singh]

Dude, you make me wish I didn't spend all of last week trolling, killing my chances of mod points this week.

Re:Ultimate Killer App

[EvanED]

KDevelop doesn't have an intellisense type feature near as I can tell, and that drops it below the 75% itself IMHO.

I just tried it, and it doesn't even seem to do auto code indenting. If i type if(a==b) { , any half decent IDE should indent the following line. KDevelop didn't. (I didn't look for an option to turn this on, I'll be fair.)

Re:Ultimate Killer App

[WillAffleckUW]

MS Visual Studio is Microsoft's ultimate killer app. It's just the single best tool for software development. I use it even when developing for Linux.

ROFLMAO.

Good one.

But you do bring up a good point that we need more - and better - IDE's for Linux development.

Re:Ultimate Killer App

[Castar]

Eclipse is great for Java development, but setting it up for C++ is a pain - especially compared to VS.

Re:Ultimate Killer App

[spectral]

I use vim, and it has ctags support and reverse tab completion and a bunch of other nifty things.

Perhaps it's the projects I've been placed on at work, but I always find myself fighting Intellisense when I'm doing windows coding. It'll pop up with the wrong things when I don't want to be bothered with it, and it'll NOT pop up when I don't know how to use something and just want to see an interface list.

Other times I just use gvim, for my solaris, mac, vms, linux and several web development projects. I find it easier to just go look at the header file for something I don't know how to use, rather than having a disruptive box popping up and stealing focus.

That being said, I've never used ctags, and maybe gvim would make my life easier if I did. Who knows?

Re:Ultimate Killer App

[yamla]

It is certainly my experience that nmake doesn't allow parallel builds. Also, Electric Cloud (I have _no_ connection with them) seems to think this is still the case.

Re:Ultimate Killer App

[rhvarona]

Visual Studio 2005 has multi-threaded builds, can take advantage of multiple CPUs. Give it a spin, it has many improvements over 2003.

Re:Ultimate Killer App

[M.C. Hampster]

Not being familiar with VS (too poor, lol)

Read: I don't know what I'm talking about, but I will comment anyways...

Re:Ultimate Killer App

[abradsn]

IDE stands for Integrated Development Environment.

Re:Ultimate Killer App

[Malc]

Runs fine on my P3-850 with 512MB memory.

Re:Ultimate Killer App

[Malc]

What are you talking about? Linux has EMACS. Check your email, browse the web, read the newsgroups, write your documentation, be interviewed by the doctor, etc, all from within the same IDE! Who needs these new fangled gimics like VS.Net?

Re:Ultimate Killer App

[EvanED]

It's not so much that I like VS's implementation of Intellisense. (It was reasonably poor in VS6, often not showing up. I've had little problem with VS.NET though.) I just used that term because it exactly describes what I'm talking about. (Something like 'code completion' doesn't, because I've seen other things that could be called that.)

I've done a lot of Java work recently in Eclipse for instance, and think that the Intellisense in Eclipse is fantastic.

Re:Ultimate Killer App

[Rakshasa Taisab]

You are obviously quite delusional. Emacs is the superior IDE, not xemacs.

Re:Ultimate Killer App

[AuMatar]

I find intellisense the single most annoying feature of any program I've ever used. I'd turn clippy on before using it.

Re:Ultimate Killer App

[dom1234]

[Visual Studio is] just the single best tool for software development

Er... Have you tried Emacs, Autoconf, Automake ? CVS ? Oh, missing GUI tools ? Have you tried QT ? Note that "to try" here means "to take the time to learn to be efficient with", which is not so much time after all.

I personally took the time to learn both "environments" (or "set of tools" for the Linux side) for a long time with big development projects (though I prefer vim to emacs, and I can't wait till vim 7 comes with an intellisence equivalent), and Linux with all its free tools made me save a lot more time. Period.

Re:Ultimate Killer App

[EvanED]

Actually, I take that back.

The 'rename' refactoring tool might make me switch to something without Intellisense. Maybe.

(Any replacement for that for XEmacs BTW? (Also, I am not trying to bash Emacs. I love Emacs. Just not for programming.))

Re:Ultimate Killer App

[AuMatar]

There's plenty of GUI front ends for GDB. I don't think anyoen uses GDB right fromt he shell anymore.

Re:Ultimate Killer App

[nate nice]

Indeed. I never used Visual Studio until I got a job working for a company that develops most of their code base in .NET. Intellisense is really great. I used to use XEmacs, gmake, tcsh and a few other tools and thought it was great. Well, it turns out Viual Studio is, at least in my opinion, 100 times better. Features like intellisense allow you to write code quicker, you don't need a reference book and since it is compiling (sort of) as you code, any mistakes you make are discovered immeadiatly.

I don't particularly care for MS but they do know how to make an IDE.

Re:Ultimate Killer App

[oGMo]

Is "intellisense" the thing that gives you a dropdown of method names and similar? If so, there are multiple existing ways to do similar things in both (x)emacs and vim (although I'm not familiar with the procedure for doing it in the latter, so a vim master will have to chime in). There's dynamic abbrevs which work with almost everything and, while not context sensitive, are generally good enough unless you don't know and haven't typed the method. But it works in any mode, so if you're typing a letter to Grandma you can autocomplete from any other buffer.

Additionally there are things like lisp-symbol-complete, and cedet which is basically written to be "intellisense for emacs" among other things.

This is the power of a programmable editor. If there's a feature you want, you can add it. If there's a feature you want to change, you can modify it. If there's a misfeature, you can get rid of it.

Re:Ultimate Killer App

[jrockway]

I do. I wouldn't have it any other way.

Re:Ultimate Killer App

[ratatask]

Until Linux gets an IDE at least 75% as good as MSDev
methinks you want this

Re:Ultimate Killer App

[skiflyer]

I agree... I still do alot of coding in emacs, it's still my favorite text editor, I still open it up to do certain things to my code... but my projects finally go just too big, now I use visual studio where appropriate and Zend's IDE for my web projects and the savings in my time have more than paid for each of them.

On the other hand, bad (as most of the free IDE's out there are in my experience) are exactly the opposite... they waste time, they lose code when they crash, they generally are a hassle... but the good ones, worth their weight in gold.

Re:Ultimate Killer App

[justasecond]

Yah. Gotta love all that automatically-generated API crap that VS dumps into your source:

// {AFX_DATA_MAP(BHatchBoundaryTab)

etc. It gives you something to read while you're looking for your code.

God help you if you accidentally delete one of those comments.

Delphi (for example) keeps your source code as you wrote it. Like every freakin other IDE in the universe.

Oh, and how many versions of msvcr71.dll are there? (Seriously, I'm asking...MSDN's dll help database claims the file doesn't exist.)

By the way, does Visual Studio ship with the source to the runtime libraries so's you can step the debugger through them? No? (Delphi does.)

VS isn't exactly bug-free either...Googling visual studio bug results in 760,000 hits; searching MSDN for PRB and Visual Studio results in *many* results (I got tired of clicking on "next", but it's a lot).

Oh, and VS's help...sucks. For example, with VB 6 (no, I *do not* develop in VB), asking for help on, e.g., Val() results in about 20 freaking pages of help to choose from. What idiot decided to integrate the entire MSDN knowledgebase into VS's help?

VS bites.

Re:Ultimate Killer App

[milimetric]

I take it this is an opinion that is at best uninformed. Or perhaps you have different definitions for "best tool for software development".

Sure, Visual Studio offers you interesting features such as automatic typed data set generation. Automatic WSDL generation. However, a good deal of other IDEs out there offer you the same benefits. Take for example WebLogic's Workshop or look at the plugins available for Eclipse.

However, Visual Studio can NOT be considered more than a BETA product for the following HUGE problems:

1.) When you compile a Windows Forms Application, if the compilation does not succeed, all the custom controls are ERASED from your code by the designer because it can't RENDER them. This is only one of the problems stemming from having a "Design-time" runtime built into your IDE. Those controls could just as easily have been replaced by a "Error, cannot DISPLAY control" rather than taking it out of your code so you have to drag all your controls back in. This is also inconsistent with the Web development side of Visual Studio which does this correctly.

2.) Code reformatting in ASP.NET. This thing reformats your code wildly. It is not annoying, it is detrimental to the project because hours can be lost trying to look through someone else's HTML to find a problem and not being able to because start / close tags don't line up well AND Visual Studio lacks even the basic Notepad++ capability of matching up tags into regions.

3.) The integration with source control makes it possible for the following scenario: When you're checking in a file, if you're typing comments in the comments box on the "Pending Checkins" window, and you need to press BACKSPACE to erase something, it won't erase from your comments, it'll erase from the FILE UNDERNEATH. This has led to a horrible bug in our application and cost many headaches.

4.) Notorious for this, at random times Visual Studio will erase the Event Handlers inside the "Designer Generated Code". It will also lose IntelliSense. Both of these are issues with thread priority and scheduling by Visual Studio that makes these threads not run at certain times for big projects.

The worst part is, Microsoft is aware of all these bugs and MANY MANY MORE but it will not fix them. About the HTML reformatting thing: "We will have to address this in another release because as it stands it is a feature that can not be removed from the code editor".

So, you've obviously:

1.) never used high class IDEs such as Eclipse, XDevelop, or IntelliJ IDEA which have infinitely brilliant features such as code refactoring and while-you-code compiling.

2.) have not used Visual Studio for too much time or on any project that exceeds 100,000 lines of code

3.) are not aware that even on Microsoft's projects Visual Studio is not widely used at all. My friends on the Redmond campus all use EMacs.

Can't believe you said "best tool". You're a tool dude. A dumb droning Microsft tool. Open your eyes dude, take the red pill.

Re:Ultimate Killer App

[anomalous cohort]

To say that VS.NET is the "ultimate killer app" sounds so outrageous that I'm tempted to think that a little astro-turfing might be going on here. VS.NET has a lot of features but it also has a lot of bugs. It's very slow when working with a large VB.NET solution. It also has periodic interop issues with VSS.

When VS.NET is acting up like that, I am grateful that I can just open up a text editor and edit the source directly like that.

Re:Ultimate Killer App

[ConceptJunkie]

Same here. The last thing I need is the app flashing information in front of my eyes every time it thinks I need it. Even if I were to turn it on, it would only be useful about 1 out of 50 times that it would pop up, who needs all that visual noise while trying to code. I can type thank you very much, and unlike Microsoft, I give my classes and methods consistent and logical names so I don't have to look everything up all the time.

Re:Ultimate Killer App

[swissmonkey]

There are similar ways to do it for XEmacs and other editors, all less practical and efficient than the VS implementation.
Not being context sensitive is simply unacceptable for example. When you start using namespaces, many classes, ... it's simply essential.

Regarding This is the power of a programmable editor. If there's a feature you want, you can add it. If there's a feature you want to change, you can modify it. If there's a misfeature, you can get rid of it.

Hint #2: You can write plugins for VStudio too.

Re:Ultimate Killer App

[Anonymous Luddite]

>> Microsoft's ultimate killer app

I don't think market penetration == killer app. It is certainly popular though.

>> I use it even when developing for Linux.

I usually do things the other way around. compile first with GCC, then under VS 6.0. IMHO the editors in linux are better, the tools faster and it's easier to write to ANSI standard.

VS does some things well, especially with bigger projects, but for most stuff it's a distant second choice.

Re:Ultimate Killer App

[Procyon101]

Now don't get me wrong, I love Emacs myself and use it everywhere, but every modern IDE I know of lets me define my own keystrokes and has hooks for absolutely every function, so the mouse arguement just doesn't hold water.

Your other points I agree with wholeheartedly. (I'm currently getting into eclipse though, as I'm digging the refactoring stuff, and I rarely find myself developing in non-windowed environments or using the god-like emacs features that no one else has or probably ever will.

VS is different... not superior, nor inferior than emacs. That's like saying sed is superior to bash.

Re:Ultimate Killer App

[Procyon101]

The context sensitive thing is my biggest pet Peeve in VS... WHY THE HELL CAN'T IT TAB INTELLIGENTLY?? Emacs has had this for a decade.

Re:Ultimate Killer App

[Mondoz]

I agree with you about JBuilder, but unfortunately, MS has the upper hand when it comes to PocketPC devices and that mobile framework stuff.

I wish I could easily use JBuilder to write apps for a PocketPC platform that can interface with PDA BCR hardware DLLs, but C# in VS2K3 makes it really easy.

I have a copy of JBuilder 2005 still in the shrink wrap that procurement finally sent me, and I get teary eyed wishing I could use it instead.
But for this sort of thing, Borland just can't come close.

Re:Ultimate Killer App

[David Horn]

In that case, you obviously haven't tried the one in Visual Studio 2005. It's like seeing God. Only through your keyboard...

Re:Ultimate Killer App

[Procyon101]

Excuse me, but autotools rock.

Oh, and I work closely with the VS Whidbey team BTW with SQL 9 integration. You do realize that even VS isn't built with VS don't you? Sure, projects are wonderful for small things, but try to manage a project file for 60 localizations for 6 seperate sku releases on 4 platforms, each requiring seperate tweaks. Since that's what MS does, they use the more appropriate winsdk massive makefile (similar to the autotools) with nmake and build.exe.

Now, going a bit further to do something that MS doesn't have to do, imaging trying to maintain a source code build system for all of the above configurations that must compile natively on each platform, regardless of whether it is running BSD, linux, OSX, or Windows, and regardless of which compiler the end platform happens to have installed! This is something that the most sophisticated tools put out by MS cannot do, because they were never designed to do that since it's not a problem that MS ever needs to solve in the foreseeable future. THAT is what autotools does, and does pretty damn well.

So just because using a chainsaw to do your own personal small bonzai project seems cumbersome, unneccisary and downright unmanageable, doesn't mean you have to evangelize that chainsaws suck.

Re:Ultimate Killer App

[hikerhat]

If you ever work on a big application where you can't memorize the thousands of function and method signatures, or you have to quickly use code you've never seen before, intellisense will become more valuable to you.

Re:Ultimate Killer App

[GlassHeart]

VIsual Studio isn't tied to nmake. At my previous job we used jam, which can take advantage of multiple CPUs.

Re:Ultimate Killer App

[Procyon101]

For parallell builds (make -j style, not distcc style) use build.exe in the winsdk. It does what you want and is what is used internally at MS. Be aware though that it builds differently than a makefile would in that procs will recurse before a dependant directory is built, so each target must be marked with PRODUCES/CONSUMES macros.

Re:Ultimate Killer App

[kminchau]

VS 2005 does have intelligent tabbing... now...
Context sensitive help is sooo helpful (when dealing with a ton of different classes and methods, context sensitive help makes it easier to remember names and stuff. It also helps to dramatically reduce the number of syntax errors that you make, by showing what you can and can't use.)

Re:Ultimate Killer App

[snorklewacker]

> If you ever work on a big application

That disqualifies just about everyone who thinks vim is adequate as an IDE. Most of them have never worked on anything bigger than their mp3 organizer in PHP.

Re:Ultimate Killer App

[recklez]

You might be right. It has a lot of bugs. It is also an enormous and highly complex application in case you did not notice. Compared to your preferred fairly simple text editor(s) is has a lot of bugs. But it also saves tons of time in developing applications, which translates into increased profits. There's the difference to me.

Re:Ultimate Killer App

[AuMatar]

I work on a project with several million lines of code. I find that if I can't remember the signature, its better to look up its definition in the source so I can see the comments on the inputs. Intellisense is still fucking annoying, I don't want popups as I type.

Besides, if you divide up the work correctly, you won't be using more than a few percent of the functions in a program, and 90% of the time you'll be calling a few percent of that portion.

Re:Ultimate Killer App

[Procyon101]

VSHelp around Version 5 completely kicked ass too... That has been steadily going downhill for some reason. PM's seem to think that loading us down with gigs of text and no decent search capabilities is a "feature".

I detest PMs.

Really.

Re:Ultimate Killer App

[Procyon101]

I'm the only one I know on the Redmond campus that uses Emacs!

All the other devs I know use SlickEdit. Except one, who uses VS, but he's new.

Oh, and one guy uses ultraedit, but he's also a BSD and TCL evangelist, so take it with a grain of salt ;)

Re:Ultimate Killer App

[EvanED]

Some implementations of "Intellisense" (in quotes because the term is actually VS specific, but I'm using it generically) show you source comments.

Besides, what if you know most of the signature, but can't remember which order the args come in? Don't really need the comments for that.

Finally, it just speeds up typing. Instead of typing out a whole name -- and very easily making a typo -- you usually just have to type a few characters.

Re:Ultimate Killer App

[strider44]

yes it does on both counts.

(Incidentely KDE's code indenting is quite a bit more powerful than VS's - it has templates for standard indentation styles [including ANSI, K&R, the Linux standard and a few more] that you may like to follow)

Re:Ultimate Killer App

[dcam]

When working with large frameworks (like .net, or for that matter the STL) or a large project, intellisense is a godsend. It gives you a thumnail sketch of what methods, and properties are exposed by any particular object. It also saves (in my case) on typos.

I guess I find your position a little strange, but maybe you have an excellent memory (I don't). Anyway, you can turn it off. Tools > Options > Text Editor > > General > Auto list members.

BTW I have switched this off when working in VC++6 some years ago. I was working on a slower machine running a larger project and it just wasn't handling it well.

Re:Ultimate Killer App

[dcam]

This is actually quite possible with VS.Net. Well possible not to the extent of emacs. First off you can do whatever remapping of keys you want (which is rather nice). I also believe that you can write what are effectively macros to modify the behaviour of the IDE, not just to modify the code.

I haven't really got into this, as I am relatively happy with the environment. I got interested when I found one brain dead feature where if you copy something that is HTML (eg from a web page) and paste it, it gets pasted as encoded HTML. This is criminally stupid. Anyway, I found that there are tools out there to modify this behaviour in the way I described above.

Re:Ultimate Killer App

[EvanED]

Ah, I see.

Before, I wrote a stupid little class to test it with, then in another file made an object of that type, then tried to get it to show the code suggestion window, and it didn't come up. What I didn't realize is that I forgot to include the file, which is why it didn't come up.

(Incidentially though, VS's Intellisense is still nicer. It gives icons corresponding to the type of member (public/private/protected and function/field) which is extremely nice. KDevelop seems to indiscriminately show all members. Eclipse (and from what I surmise from other comments, VS 2005) goes a step further and for the currently highlighted function shows any documentation associated with it, drawn from the JavaDoc. KDevelop doesn't even give you the return type.)

As for the indentation, I didn't have the option on to do it.

So it looks like my earlier comments were just my ignorance and stupidity talking. (Which is not surprising, considering that I was pretty sure that I had seen both those features in KDevelop before.)

(BTW, the comments on its shortfallings are based on KDevelop 3.1.2, so I'm a minor release behind.)

Re:Ultimate Killer App

[AaronBrethorst]

Too poor?!? You can go download our Express Editions of Visual Studio 2005 Beta 2 for free right now if you want from this web site here.

Re:Ultimate Killer App

[Lebrun]

I have to work with Visual Studio .Net 2003, and to me it's one (maybe the one) worst IDEs I've used, second only to the Oracle Forms/Reports crap. Even for Windows development, Borland C++ Builder is a far superior IDE. For the web, Dreamweaver is still the tool to beat. On the linux side, the choices are much broader.

Re:Ultimate Killer App

[Unoti]

its better to look up its definition in the source so I can see the comments on the inputs.

Perhaps you should actually try intellisense before you talk out your ass. Intellisense does show you the comments associated with the method you're calling, as well as the return type, and the comments associated with each of the individual parameters. As you move through the parameters, intellisense updates the tooltop to show you the comments associated with each input parameter separately. People can blast Visual Studio all day, but I'd be willing to bet that almost none of them have actually used Visual Studio on a non-trivial project.

Re:Ultimate Killer App

[LDoggg_]

J2ME with a JNI wrapper? Really a question not a suggestion. I haven't done java on a pda since my palmIII was new :)

Jbuilder 2005 is great, I've been using it since its release. I'm slowly switching to eclipse now that the j2ee webtools has hit 0.7. The rich client platform is based on the 3.1 release as well, so they should be able to co-exist on one install.

Re:Ultimate Killer App

[fingusernames]

Um. I use nvi. And I've developed some really large projects in my almost 20 years of professional development, though admittedly scarcely any with a front-end user GUI. Remember, we developers managed just fine before all these GUI IDEs came along to hold our hands. The only IDE I have ever really used was Borland Turbo C back in the 80s under DOS. However, I may have reason to use Visual Studio on an upcoming project. Is there a vi keybinding for its editor, or do you have to use the f'ing arrow keys and mouse all the time?

Larry

Re:Ultimate Killer App

[dom1234]

Is Intellisense the only plusvalue ?

Vim 7 will include auto-completion. Emacs has a plugin for autocompletion for Java, and probably something alike for C++. So, what's left ?

Re:Ultimate Killer App

[jtwJGuevara]

Not being familiar with VS (too poor, lol)

Visual Studio is embarrasingly cheap with an educational discount if you compare it to its retail price. Have a family member or a friend in school purchase it for you and just pay them back.

For example, see the following:
http://www.gradware.com/ProductDetailT.asp?Product ID=5522

Re:Ultimate Killer App

[Corngood]

In visual studio you can attach to a running process on another machine and debug it exactly as if it were running locally. You can step from sql to C++ to .Net (lots of languages) to DirectX shaders... You can modify the code of said running process, recompile it, and patch it back into memory without restarting it. You can even do these things if the other machine happens to be an xbox. It's a massive set of tools, and the debugger is just one insanely awesome part of it.

Re:Ultimate Killer App

[hammeredpeon]

I work with visual studio at work, and at home, no matter what language i'm coding in, i use vim. Intellisense is nice if you don't know the apis, or are too lazy to look at the documentation, but most of the stuff I use I know pretty well now. Further, intellisense allows other coders to name their stuff inconsistently and sometimes incoherently, making it hell for me to dig through. I'm glad some people like the intellisense. Me? I'll take 2 monitors, one with a web page describing the API I'm using and the other with 4-5 xterm windows running vim.

Re:Ultimate Killer App

[hikerhat]

I used vim for all my university projects, and the first three years or so of "real world" coding. I switched to IDE's that have code completion because that's the killer feature. VIM and Emacs are superior for every code editing job except for the killer feature - code completion. The Emacs plugin for java is pretty good though. Hopefully vim will have good code completion, and then I can switch back.

Re:Ultimate Killer App

[hikerhat]

Besides, if you divide up the work correctly, you won't be using more than a few percent of the functions in a program, and 90% of the time you'll be calling a few percent of that portion.

Right. As I said, once you work on a project where _you_ work on more than a few hundred methods/functions you'll grok why every good code editor has code completion.

Re:Ultimate Killer App

[superpulpsicle]

No way. The most superior light weight editor is Editplus. Which does infinite syntax highlighting for ALL languages. Splitscreens, and a million other useful features.

If you have wine running on linux, it can work there too. Editplus eats Emacs and VIM alive for breakfast.

Re:Ultimate Killer App

[TehBeer]

http://www.anjuta.org/ http://www.eclipse.org/cdt/ http://www.monodevelop.org/ http://glade.gnome.org/ please get a clue

Re:Ultimate Killer App

[EvanED]

Don't forget refactoring support.

This is a recent innovation in IDEs (last couple years) but is one I could easily see becoming a second killer feature.

I put Refactor > Rename alone at almost the importance level I hold Intellisense, which, as you can see somewhere around here, is very high.

(Okay, I suppose that there could be a VI or Emacs plugin that'll do this, but I haven't run across any)

Re:Ultimate Killer App

[KlomDark]

Uh...

To turn IntelliSense options off by default

On the Tools menu, click Options.
Select the Text Editor folder.
Select the folder for the language you want to customize IntelliSense.
Select a property page for the language and clear check boxes for the options that you do not want.

(In doing this research, I just discovered a setting "Hide Advanced Members" that was ON (???) by default for VB.NET. Just turned that off, I've been confused for quite a while why certain things that I KNEW where there were not showing up. Woohoo!!)

Re:Ultimate Killer App

[jthuck]

You should seriously give it a shot. Where I work, we've been stuck with VC++ 6 until recently, and after reconfiguring /just our precompiled headers/ it took one of our executables from 45 minutes to 15 minutes (compile time). Throw in a make tool that spawns multiple processes, and my hyperthreaded workstation takes it down to 8 minutes (but watch your pdb and debug files grow without bound if you do parallel compiles :)

Either way, investigate PCH and give it another shot.

Re:Ultimate Killer App

[Calroth]

VS isn't exactly bug-free either...Googling visual studio bug results in 760,000 hits

Google search for visual studio bug - 840,000 results
Google search for eclipse bug - 1,480,000 results
Google search for emacs bug - 1,170,000 results
Google search for slashdot bug - 1,460,000 results
Google search for bright purple elephant bug - 131,000 results

Congratulations! You have given us a meaningless statistic.

Re:Ultimate Killer App

[Frankie70]

By the way, does Visual Studio ship with the source to the runtime libraries so's you can step the debugger through them? No? (Delphi does.)


Actually, VS also ships with sources for the Runtime Library - go check your install again.

Re:Ultimate Killer App

[oGMo]

There are similar ways to do it for XEmacs and other editors, all less practical and efficient than the VS implementation.

Less efficient? How? Either you've never seen the code and don't know what you're talking about, or you work for Microsoft (and you're already biased). In either case, you're asserting that Visual Studio has some magical property that it is impossible to match in another codebase. I suggest you rethink this assertion: even elisp code can be efficient, and you can write vim plugins in C.

Not being context sensitive is simply unacceptable for example. When you start using namespaces, many classes, ... it's simply essential.

And the only one of the named methods (dynamic abbrevs) is context-insensitive. All the others are language-intelligent.

Hint #2: You can write plugins for VStudio too.

I'm happy to know that Visual Studio can finally do what emacs has done for 35 years.

Re:Ultimate Killer App

[Malc]

Try debugging. I can attach to my client app (native, script or .Net framework) and step through the code there. I can also be simultaneously attached to IIS and step through the server side code as the client calls it, and have it seamlessly step in to a T-SQL stored procedure on the database, and back out. On top of that, working with GDB + a graphical frontend (or emacs) is just plain frustrating and extremely limited in comparison. It little things like being able to type "eax,hr" in to the watches window and seeing the HRESULT code description alongside the eax register's value when returning from functions. Or having it automatically interpret the 128-bit GUIDs and display the more useful class or interface name. Finally, things just work without having to fiddle with configs and spending ages getting it all setup.

Re:Ultimate Killer App

[killjoe]

Notice he got modded up to 5 for his shilling.

Re:Ultimate Killer App

[killjoe]

If you are not entitled to the education discount and you get somebody else to buy if for you then you are comitting a crime.

Also if you produce any code for production using your education version you are comitting a crime.

Read the license, then the DMCA.

Re:Ultimate Killer App

[WasterDave]

XCode's just the same way for the Mac.

Not sure in what way you're saying - good or bad - but I've been using XCode 2 for the last couple of weeks and it's a monster huge improvement on earlier iterations. The "all in one" view is much easier to manage and (sit down) the code sense thing actually works now.

Dave

Re:Ultimate Killer App

[ChineseHell]

What you describe is not an INTEGRATED Developement Environment but an AGGREGATED Developement Environment

Re:Ultimate Killer App

[nmg196]

You obviously haven't used it for more than a few minutes. The alternative would be learn the entire of the framework off by heart. Apparently if you print out all the help pages in VS.NET it would be a stack of paper 14 meters high.

Re:Ultimate Killer App

[AuMatar]

When did I insult the MSDN help system? MSDN is very nice, its something MS did right for once. The VS debugger is nice too. But intellisense drives me fucking batty. On the rare occasion I code on Windows, I use emacs and only open VS for the debugger and the help system (using the local help is quicker than using msdn.com, even over broadband).

Re:Ultimate Killer App

[nmg196]

> if I can't remember the signature, its better to look up
> its definition in the source so I can see the comments on the inputs.

Intellisense in VS *DOES* shows you the comments from the source. Why do you think that the source comments have to be entered in XML?? Why do think there's a whole thread of people saying how good it is even though it's an MS product? If you're not seeing the comments, then you haven't been following the templates or RTFM.

I hate to say it but it's fucking amazing - especially in VS.NET 2005.

The thread title is correct - it's Microsoft's Killer App.

> Besides, if you divide up the work correctly, you won't be using more
> than a few percent of the functions in a program,

Not all companies are big enough to "divide up the work". I have to do the entire project on my own. Which after 6 months is a LOT of functions. I guarantee it would take nearly everyone except genius autistic programmers more time to write large projects if if VS.NET didn't have any intellisense.

I can't see how it can be annoying. If you type quickly without pausing then it doesn't even appear. If you really do know what you're supposed to be typing then you probably won't pause because. The only reason I can think of to pause halfway though typing a function call is if you're having to go and find the function definition because you can't remember what the next argument is :)

Re:Ultimate Killer App

[bheer]

I used to think Intellisense was a crutch too. Of course, even if you don't have to deal with API explosion you might have to deal with legacy code (and some burn-your-eyes-out bad code at that) at some point and then it really pays off, along with its navigation to definition/reference feature.

My only gripe about VS was refactoring (or tha lack of it), but VS 2005 does a good job there.

Re:Ultimate Killer App

[jtwJGuevara]

I certainly don't wish to break any laws and my suggestion was in good faith without knowledge of the possible fact that what I suggested was illegal. However, I skimmed through the DMCA and did not read any provisions speaking directly of this activity. I may have missed it, but I certainly didn't see one. I, of course, do not have a copy of a VS EULA so I can't speak to what is contained in that.

Also if you produce any code for production using your education version you are comitting a crime.

I'm curious what is meant here by production. It was my understanding with most educational licenses permitted you to create any works as long as those works were not distributed for or commercial profit or in conjunction or for use by a commercial organizational. Does this prevent me from doing something like writing/publishing my own personal dynamic website in .NET or writing an app in .NET and giving it away for free?

Re:Ultimate Killer App

[scottsk]

One major problemo with VS or any proprietary IDE is that it may increase productivity to an extent, but when you load all your code into it, and get to being productive, then you hit some show-stopping bug that has no solution, and your entire project is in some proprietary format and you're stuck. No thanks. Besides, MS keeps changing the VS file format (it used to be their proprietary bizarro make language, then a binary file, then make again, then both, etc). Then they do something like bet the company on .NET and your nice C++ IDE is suddenly this horrible proprietary language code generator. Remember Asymetrix Supercede for Java's first edition? At a time when Java IDEs were unusably slow and immature, it was a slick, fast, workable GUI builder. Then with the next version, Asymetrix turned it into a COM (what they used to call .NET) object building tool, then discontinued it. IDEs may be short-term more productive, but in the long term they've always bitten me hard and I don't like them. I prefer Emacs and make, which at least work properly and aren't going to change significantly because too many real projects use them for them to whimsically change (unlike a proprietary IDE).

Re:Ultimate Killer App

[brettper]

You piqued my curiosity - but as it turns out none of the bright purple elephant bugs in the first page of google results are software-related. Quite disappointing really.

Re:Ultimate Killer App

[Ravatar]

You could write VS plugins ever since VS.net(2002), it's just much easier now, and has support within the IDE (via templates) now. Note: You could probably write plugins for older VS, although I'm uncertain.

Re:Ultimate Killer App

[arevos]

MS Visual Studio is Microsoft's ultimate killer app. It's just the single best tool for software development

As far as I know, MS VS can only be used to develop software that use Microsoft support languages and tools, such as ASP, C#, C++ and VB. This rather limits its usefulness in quite a few areas of software development.

Re:Ultimate Killer App

[Ravatar]

VB.NET background compilation is greatly optimized in VS 2005, and the SourceSafe that ships with VS 2005 is quite a bit superior to previous releases as well.

Re:Ultimate Killer App

[Ravatar]

If you ever start working with any .NET framework classes, you'll be glad that Intellisense exists. While the 2 monitor solution might work, I prefer doing the same, with 1 monitor (and 1 IDE), a lot faster :)

Re:Ultimate Killer App

[Ravatar]

I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and leave it at the possibility you're misinformed, if not paranoid. You say proprietary about 5 times, which leads me to believe that you are biased against VS from the start.

Anyways, VS.NET uses XML to write out solution and project files, which is quite opposite of proprietary.

In VS.NET, you can write code the same way you wrote code in VS6. You never have to use or see a single line of .NET code in your C++ solution.

If you're referring to .NET languages as "proprietary", the base platform itself is covered by ECMA/ISO, as is its flagship language, C#.

Re:Ultimate Killer App

[EvanED]

Older versions of Qt (i.e. 2) had pre-.NET Visual Studio plug-ins.

Re:Ultimate Killer App

[EvanED]

Um, if you use VS, your code doesn't magically go away.

If you work in VS for a while, then the bits on your computer get corrupted and it doesn't work, or you hit a bug, or whatever, JUST TAKE YOUR CODE AND USE SOMETHING ELSE. You'll be no worse off than if you had just used something else initially. (Okay, you may be a little worse off because you'd have to write a makefile, but that's something you'd have to have already done and it would have slowed you down later.)

Re:Ultimate Killer App

[EvanED]

Keep in mind that anything you produce will probably be tied to the VC++ library that ships with VS. If you call printf, MS's (copyrighted) printf implementation goes with your code. You code could then be considered a derivative work.

The license grants you no rights to produce such a work because you're not a student, so at the very least you probably wouldn't be able to distribute them. (You could argue fair use, but in the case of distribution I don't think it'd fly.)

Of course, if you replace the Microsoft's implementation with, say, some glibc for Windows, you're probably golden as far as criminal court goes.

(However, MS could probably still get you on a breach of CONTRACT, assuming that EULAs aren't thrown out. They probably couldn't garnish any profits from your work per se, but they could force you to buy the full version of VS, plus punative damages, plus costs, plus your costs.)

Re:Ultimate Killer App

[freedom_india]

Oh Boy !. I really miss my mod points now !

Re:Ultimate Killer App

[sproketboy]

Sorry but IntelliJ IDEA blows it away.
(oh and it does run on linux)

Re:Ultimate Killer App

[Zerbs]

I've worked with Visual Studio 6, .Net2002, and .Net2003. Haven't looked at 2005 yet, but have heard good things. What I've noticed though over time at least through 2003 version is that Visual Studio's IDE was becoming more and more like what I remember Borland's IDE being in Delphi 3 and 4. Unfortunately I haven't worked with Delphi since version 4 so I don't know how Borland's IDE has progressed.
I still have some problems though trying to create applications in Visual Studio that behave consistantly with mouse or keyboard input. Mouse input can be cumbersome in heavy data entry applications.

Re:Ultimate Killer App

[zootm]

Some implementations of "Intellisense" (in quotes because the term is actually VS specific, but I'm using it generically) show you source comments.

Including Intellisense without quotes, for the record. :)

Re:Ultimate Killer App

[Mondoz]

"J2ME with a JNI wrapper?"

Of course, Java can do it, don't get me wrong. However, MS has tools to allow you to debug running processes on the device remotely, through their synch app, as if the program was running right there on the desktop.
Having access to breakpoints and all the other tools a debugger gives you while the program is actually running on the PDA is amazingly useful, and VS2K3 does it very well.

I only wish Borland had something like this.

Re:Ultimate Killer App

[merlin_jim]

And yes, I know about a lot of the alternatives, they just all suck so bad they aren't worthy of mentioning by name. Eclipse is better than most, but is java, and slow....

Eclipse is a joke of an IDE. It's impossible to use it productively unless you've got a multi-GHz machine with >= 1GB RAM and a nice fast disk. The company I work for has machines which are pretty screaming running Visual Studio. But we more than double the RAM in these machines if someone gets assigned to a project requiring Eclipse... The price of a few GB of laptop RAM more than outweigh the productivity cost of not having it.

Re:Ultimate Killer App

[merlin_jim]

I tell you what I'll accept your comparison of Eclipse to Visual Studio when:

1. It loads in no more than 200% of the time of Visual Studio
2. It's intellisense on a 2 GHz computer with 1 GB RAM actually kicks in before I finish typing
3. It's able to treat a J2EE web project as a web project, with automatic deployment and debugging

Until then get outta here with your Eclipse speak.

Re:Ultimate Killer App

[anomalous cohort]

VB.NET background compilation is greatly optimized in VS 2005

I've heard this before but can't find any references online. Could you provide the URL to any page that discusses this?

Re:Ultimate Killer App

[merlin_jim]

I guarantee it would take nearly everyone except genius autistic programmers more time to write large projects if if VS.NET didn't have any intellisense.

As a genius autistic programmer (well autistic at least... though most of my coworkers wouldn't argue the genius part) I have to say that while yes I can keep all that straight in my head... Intellisense is great as a sanity check. Especially when there are multiple overloads of a method with similar arguments.

Re:Ultimate Killer App

[SComps]

Can't believe you said "best tool". You're a tool dude. A dumb droning Microsft tool. Open your eyes dude, take the red pill.

You did awesome right up to that. Your arguements were concise, well thought out and even coherent. I didn't agree with some of them, but hey, that's what's cool about being reasonable.

Then you blew it with the last line. You dragged yourself down to the slashdot level and showed your true colors making the balance of your post irrelevent. Now I can't be sure that you meant what you said or just regurgitated something you read elsewhere. *sigh*

Re:Ultimate Killer App

[Ravatar]

This article on MSDN magazine (June 2005) explains a little about how VB.NET background compilation works, and several changes they're making to its functionality for VS 2005.

Re:Ultimate Killer App

[milimetric]

no, I meant what I said, and I found each and every one of those bugs through my own painful experiences.

and, you're right, I did blow it with that last line. Perhaps if I was in a more diplomatic mood I would have said: "In order to make a claim that something is the best, you must make a point that everything else is not as good". However, duly noted, I will try to be less offensive in my future posts. My apologies to the original poster.

Re:Ultimate Killer App

[Hard_Code]

Is the Academic version crippled in some way? Because I keep hearing people rave about VS, but I have MS VS .net 2003, and I find it lacks a LOT features I take for granted in even free editors and IDEs. There doesn't appear to be in-editor brace highlighting (it highlights as you add and remove them, which is something I have to do just to trigger it, but not when your cursor is on a brace). The editor tabs don't have independent close buttons so I have to use the single one in the upper right hand corner. The editor options are embarrassingly anemic. I can't get rid of that horizontal drop-down navigation bar on every single editor pane. The Task List seems to be on a per-document basis, which means I can't see all the tasks for an entire project or solution. Finally, and this is probably just a C/C++ thing, but organizing virtual "project folders" and real physical "file system folders" is a nightmare. There is apparently no way to just have VS import the directory structure. You have to painstakingly recreate in-IDE the physical directory layout. If you organize modules and namespaces into distinct, often nested, directories, this is a huge PITA. What else? The auto-update feature has not seemed to ever work. It used to give me some completely opaque network or service error, but not it is just telling me to go to windows update instead (2 years, and no updates at all?). It had a bizarre bug whereby the entire IDE locked up when presented with a certain hanging bracket. This took DAYS of my time with MS tech support to resolve, finally I figured it out myself through regression through many different options. If I actually used the IDE for day-to-day official work I would be even more pissed than I was.

That said, most other C/C++ IDEs I've used have also sucked. So maybe it's par for the course.

Re:Ultimate Killer App

[blurredVisionary]

I am by no means flaming VS(I have used it since the original Beta 1 came out) but I did want to clarify a few things.

VS.NET does use XML as you mentioned; however the XML that it uses for project files is in MSBuild format(In VS 2005)... which is proprietary. I am sure that this format/schema, like their previous formats/schemas is protected the same way that OfficeML and others were.

Also, to add to your ECMA spec reference; IL(Or as Microsoft calls it MSIL) itself will of course match and implement the *entire* ECMA spec and CLS compliancy. C#, MS's 'flagship' does not have all of the capabilities defined in the spec and is a proprietary implementation. Seriously; decompile it and write your own home-grown version and call it NotC# -- watch how quickly you will be contacted by an MS lawyer.

The concept of ECMA, CLS, CLR, etc ... is awesome; and I am thinking that this is what you may have meant to refer to. This is non-proprietary.

Anyhow, VS 2005 is by far one of the best tools that I have used to develop in. Microsoft(Like them or not) have done a fine job with it. My only real complaint is that the framework and the IDE need to be separated.

Re:Ultimate Killer App

[killjoe]

"Does this prevent me from doing something like writing/publishing my own personal dynamic website in .NET or writing an app in .NET and giving it away for free?"

It may very well be against the EULA. The purpose educational discount is to give you a cheap version so you can learn it and then evangellize it after you graduate. The purpose is not for you to write software for production use. If I was you I would submit the EULA to a lawyer and get his opinion on it. MS certainly bans GPL like licenses.

Re:Ultimate Killer App

[Ravatar]

I'll rest my case here and here.

The only things that you would catch trouble for trying to "make your own home-grown version" of would be things like ASP/ADO.NET and Winforms, which are not part of the ECMA spec.

Re:Ultimate Killer App

[Froggert]

You should look at VS 2005 Beta 2. There should be an option called "code definition window" that shows you the implementation of the function you are calling. It's very useful.

Re:Ultimate Killer App

[spongman]

not impossible, just hard (and not done yet). VS provides suggestions based on context: ie, which identifiers/types are currently in scope and/or relevant. the intellisense engine uses the same definition of scope that the compiler uses, and it does it across multiple projects, referenced libraries/typelibs, taking into account project build settings and a deep understanding of the semantics of the language. it's not your father's ctags

Re:Ultimate Killer App

[ciroknight]

Yeah that's what I mean.. the one thing Apple needed for Mac OS X to become as popular as it has was a good way to code for it, and thusly XCode was born, being the best of breed in Mac development.

You just can't have a good GUI without a good IDE.

Re:Ultimate Killer App

[HuguesT]

Why the obsession for the GUI? through practice I got to know the gdb command set well enough, GUIs get in the way.

Re:Ultimate Killer App

[HuguesT]

I'm not sure any crime is committed if somebody buys a student/teacher VS license and then sells it to you. The EULA may prevent it but it goes against the doctrine of first sale and so probably would not hold in court. IANAL so this is does not constitute any legal advice.

If you want to avoid the problem you mention of shipping some Microsoft software along your code without a proper license, then first you can develop your software using the student/teacher version of VS, and then compile for production using the free command-line tools.

There are few restrictions on the compiled code shipped with the free tools, from Microsoft:

Are there any restrictions on how I use the Visual C++ Toolkit?
In general, no. You may use the Toolkit to build C++ -based applications, even commercial applications, and you may redistribute those applications in accordance with the terms of the End User License Agreement (EULA).

The text of the said EULA is for once rather short and unobtrusive (for these sort of things).

Re:Ultimate Killer App

[bogado]

That's what I think, or more or less at least. I believe there is a tool for each problem.

Not all bugs are better squiched by a debug run, sometimes the good-old printf in the right place is quicker.

Having the gui giving you hints all the time for what you want to write next is cool, until it get things wrong.

Not all persons are equal, not all tasks are equal, there isn't one tool to kill them all. There will aways be a guy that will preffer to do things different, and if he is happy (even if it makes a little bit slower typing) who am I to question?

Re:Ultimate Killer App

[Listen Up]

I am a software engineer and I develop full-time in Java using Borland JBuilder 2005. The 'Intellisense' in JBuilder 2005 is absolutely excellent as well as all of its other features. I would rank JBuilder 2005 right up there on the same level as VS.NET 2005.

Starting with JBuilder 2006, Borland is planning to move the entire JBuilder IDE to Eclipse. I have tried Eclipse, but only for a few minutes here and there. I plan to move to Eclipse full-time in the future, once JBuilder moves to an Eclipse base.

Does anyone have any extensive experience with both IDE's to be able to give a clear and objective comparison between them both? Thanks.

Re:Ultimate Killer App

[Listen Up]

Your post says to everyone who programs for a living on non-trivial projects that you have no idea what you are talking about. Your last sentence is completely non-sensical rubbish.

All major modern IDE's today (VS.NET, XCode, etc.) are absolutely excellent at everything that they do and include features your list of software does not even begin to offer. And each of them are infinitely extendable/extensible by using a plugins architecture, among other excellent features.

Windows programming is purposely vague..

[brxndxn]

After my brief dabble in programming for Windows, it seemed to me that any functions worthwhile were only 'figured-out' and nondocumented by Microsoft. Maybe I'm biased, actually.. of course I am, but it seems pretty blatant that Microsoft doesn't adequately document the functions so that their crappy Windows software looks advantagious in comparison.

I'll check out the book. :P

Re:Windows programming is purposely vague..

[Timesprout]

Four letters. MSDN. Now show me something comparable in the OS world.

Re:Windows programming is purposely vague..

[sunwukong]

Sourceforge, Freshmeat, CPAN, GNU.org...

Re:Windows programming is purposely vague..

[I8TheWorm]

I think you missed the point of the OP.. it appears they were eluding to msdn.microsoft.com, or the MSDN help files that ship with Visual Studio.

In the past, I didn't find either to be terribly useful, but (I hate to say it) Microsoft got it right this time. With MSDN for VS.Net, I actually find what I need in the documentation, rather than having to use google.

Re:Windows programming is purposely vague..

[dutchd00d]

/usr/share/man/*

Re:Windows programming is purposely vague..

[Timesprout]

Only on /. would someone be dumb enough to cite sourceforge as a good example of a fully integrated help/documentation/examples/technical discussion/articles/books/advise system. Sourceforge is many things but if you look at 95% of the projects on it they have nothing whatsoever to do with quality code or documentation.

Re:Windows programming is purposely vague..

[ReluctantRefactorer]

You're having a laugh aren't you? Windows developers have got fantastic documentation/help/sample code (MSDN, Codeproject to name but two)

If you want vague and non-documented, you should try developing on Symbian (*shudders*)

Re:Windows programming is purposely vague..

[sunwukong]

Pfft -- keep your personal insults under your rock and think about why I've cited these sites. There's obviously a huge philosophical difference between how and why Microsoft can create this all encompassing bundle versus the toolset that OS people tend to use ...

Re:Windows programming is purposely vague..

[aztracker1]

WTF are you talking about? have you even *LOOKED* at the msdn documentation? hell, just the .Net sdk docs are more consistant, and organized than *ANY* api docs for any other platform I've seen.

Re:Windows programming is purposely vague..

[HungWeiLo]

The QT online docs are concise and much more organized than MSDN. Unfortunately, they're only for QT libraries.

Re:Windows programming is purposely vague..

[springbox]

I'm not sure what features you are talking about but from what I can tell the windows API is very well documented. Just get the latest version of the Platform SDK and download most of the documentation or read it online (msdn.microsoft.com) and you'll be set.

Also, the book is about making changes to the VS IDE and probably won't help you with your document problems.

Re:Windows programming is purposely vague..

[SeekerDarksteel]

MSDN is pretty useful, but it is also woefully lacking in detail in some areas. Several times I've had to resort to crawling through 10+ pages of google searches to find information that should have been in the MSDN that wasn't. For example, in VB6 a ListView object must have focus in order for a manual call to StartLabelEdit to work. It took me forever to figure out why the method, which was called by clicking on a button elsewhere on the form thus taking focus away from the ListView, wouldn't work.

Re:Windows programming is purposely vague..

[i_am_not_a_bomba]

Google.

I programmed for Windows. Now I am currently programming for Linux. With Windows you have MSDN, but that's *all* you've got, outside of that there's books and a sparcity of Windows forums. When programming for anything based on *nix you have the knowledge of the entire progamming community just a few keywords away in google. Thousands of forums, articles, how-tos and manuals. I would make a completetly random guess and say that quality useful info for *nix based operating systems on the internet outweighs Windows by 100/1.

Plus MSDN is not that great anyway, its a pain in the arse to navigate through and the content can be arcane and can really not make much sense. Yes the same problems exists with some of the content in the *nix world but chances are that I can find at least two or three other sources for the information that i'm after.

Re:Windows programming is purposely vague..

[Skim123]

With Windows you have MSDN, but that's *all* you've got, outside of that there's books and a sparcity of Windows forums. When programming for anything based on *nix you have the knowledge of the entire progamming community just a few keywords away in google.

Oh please. I mean, really - please. There are gobs of forums, resource sites, how-tos, tutorials, and so on. I mean freakin' tons. In fact, I'd wager that they far outnumber the presence of *nix resources out there. Just think of it this way - there are more Windows programmers than *nix programmers in the universe, hence it would only make sense that Windows resources would be more prevelent on the Web.

Re:Windows programming is purposely vague..

[jenesuispasgoth]

Four letters. MSDN. Now show me something comparable in the OS world.
Three letters. MAN

Re:Windows programming is purposely vague..

[Shaper_pmp]

"There are gobs of forums, resource sites, how-tos, tutorials, and so on."

There are indeed, but the majority of these tend to be small-scale or very, very elementary, only really useful for learning.

In terms of useful, comprehensive sites like CPAN (especially which don't require membership), there's surprisingly little, especially given the huge number of Microsoft-centric programmers.

I've always had trouble finding good examples of more advanced functionality, and finding well-written, comprehensive pre-written modules or libraries that you don't have to pay through the nose for is often an exercise in frustration. OTOH, I can jump onto CPAN (or many "amateur" websites) and find better-written, more correct and more comprehensive examples, for free.

I think part of the problem is the different cultures at work here - the share-for-free Open Source culture versus the proprietary paid-for-consultancy of the Windows world.

When an OSS programmer becomes good enough to start writing libraries or modules he tends to make them available for free, as source code, since he took advantage of others' free examples when learning. He's also more likely to "open" something he wrote for himeself, if it looks like it might be useful to others.

This sharing leads to a strong sense of community, as a side-effect so he's also more likely to hang out on bulletin boards and forums (fora?) to share the knowledge with others.

When a MS-centric programmer becomes good enough to produce stuff of worth to other people, he's more likely to charge consultancy fees or just sell it as a pre-compiled downloadable .OCX control for $60+.

This leads to a proprietary culture where since you have to pay to acquire much of value, you're less likely to give away your work, since that would represent a net loss.

This is again understandable, since in my experience many MS-centric programmers tend to pay for training courses to learn new skills (and they see nothing wrong with trying to recoup those costs in turn), whereas in OSS people are more likely to take a few hours off and sit down with a good website/book and a compiler - they gain the knowledge cheaper/free thanks to the altruism of others, and so are predisposed to pay it back in their turn.

Re:Windows programming is purposely vague..

[Pollardito]

i have yet to meet the bundle of windows programming documentation that can even give Man pages a run for their money. it can be damned hard to make heads or tails of the expected return values from functions and documentation of all parameters of some function calls. MSDN and the VS.Net integrated documentation are decent, but they really fall short in fully covering the languages included. the sad thing is that their biggest weakness is consistency of layout/format, which is something that you'd think a single company would be able to pull together better than the multiple sources for man pages and the like.

Re:Windows programming is purposely vague..

[Skim123]

There may be a fundamental difference in mindset between OSS and Microsoft developers, but please don't paint with too broad a brush. There are those in the Microsoft world who offer free and open-source products. In fact, here's my (very-small) directory of some useful products: http://www.dotnettoolbox.com/. Also, here are two open-source ASP.NET server controls I created - skmMenu and RssFeed.

Additionally, there is a large site with extensive docs, articles, etc. that are available for free. It's called MSDN. There really are a gob of articles there, including many advanced-level ones. Ditto Microsoft's MSDN Magazine. While a print copy costs $$$, all the articles can be viewed for free online.

Re:Windows programming is purposely vague..

[Shaper_pmp]

That's a fair point - I didn't mean to imply specific cases, just illustrate general trends.

In addition, all the "amateur" examples you give are your own work. Fair play for your contributions, but where are the multiple-contributor independant equivalents of CPAN?

The closest thing I've found is forum sites like Experts Exchange, but these tend to deal with everything from Visual C++ to PHP, so they're hardly Microsoft-centric, just general developer resources.

MSDN is pretty much the free resource for all things Microsoft, and it sufers greatly for it. It's not run by talented amateurs, so what you get tends to be the "party line". Something isn't documented in the help, chances are it isn't documented in MSDN. There are "tips & tricks" articles, granted, but they're generally in wildly different places to the hardcore technical documentation, so their usefulness is limited.

It's also hard for "outsiders" to contribute improvements, corrections and content, so as a lot of posters have pointed out a lot of what's there risks being incomplete or incorrect.

This is also a single huge site, so personally I find finding anything to be extremely hard - search is often next to useless, and there's very little way to compartmentalise your search (eg, to just Visual C++, or "the latest-but-one version of ASP.NET").

I've always blamed this situation on the essential differences between the cultures - open source seems to value transparent and free information-flow as its highest priority, whereas businesses only take any action if it's perceived ultimately to add value to the shares, and this can often mean restricting information rather than publishing it competely and accurately.

I'm not making any judgement here on which of these aims is the most noble, but which would you expect to lead to the most complete, informative documentation?

Re:Windows programming is purposely vague..

[Skim123]

where are the multiple-contributor independant equivalents of CPAN?

GotDotNet, perhaps? There are a lot of open-source, collaborative projects there.

Experts Exchange is a forum, as you know; there are many 'official' forums that are more targetted, see the ASP.NET Forums for a rather large example. In a similar vein, there are some other great targetted resources - ASPMessageboard.com, ASP Advice (a bevy of email listservs), a slew of high-traffic USENET groups (see microsoft.public.dotnet and start drilling down...) (My expertise is in the ASP.NET world, so you'll excuse my ignorance on resources in other Microsoft-technology arenas...)

Regarding searching MSDN, I agree, it's difficult. Everyone I know who uses MSDN often uses Google's site search. There's also Google's Microsoft-specific search. Also, while a number of contributors to MSDN are Microsofties, a large number are not - they are 'real-world' professionals or independent contractors. I've written for MSDN Magazine, MSDN Online (specifically the ASP.NET Dev Center), and general MSDN documentation. The point is, they do dole out a lot of the 'docs' to non-Microsoft employees.

I agree with you that businesses - whether they are OSS-related businesses or not - "only take any action if it's perceived ultimately to add value to the shares." (Do you think IBM or Sun or Redhat are going to take actions that directly underminde share valuation?) However, people typically are more about the free flow of information. And, yes, these types of people exist in the Microsoft world as much so as they do in the OSS world, IMO. From my experiences I can tell you that I've personally met literally hundreds of developers working on Microsoft technologies that spend a good chunk of their time writing free articles, speaking at user groups, helping answer questions on messageboards/listservs/USENET, and so on. I guess I'm saying, Microsoft-aligned and OSS-aligned companies will, IMHO, act similarly (i.e., in the best interest of the business), and the people will act similarly as well.

Re:Windows programming is purposely vague..

[Pollardito]

quick example. go into Visual Studio, look at the help page for Cache.Item Property in the framework library. tell me what this function returns if the item isn't in the cache. one could assume that it returns Nothing, but you shouldn't have to. Cache.Remove has a Return Value heading telling you that it will return Nothing if the item isn't in the cache. this sort of problem is all over the documentation, and makes it so that quite frankly the easiest way to learn return values on a lot of functions is to write quick examples and just see what it does. some of their documentation is really good, but some of the basic stuff is just plain missing. return values and parameter explanations is something that i never had a problem with when i was doing unix programming, but maybe i wasn't going too deep into the libraries.

Re:Windows programming is purposely vague..

[i_am_not_a_bomba]

Hmm, I offer at least my anecdotal evidence that it has been far easier to find relevant information when programming for linux than Windows and you offer what to support your rant?

I just did a search for "windows programming" vs "linux programming", the first few results for windows were books, commercial sites (get used to dozens of blinking ads when you lookup at windows resource sites) and some obscure sites that have little relevance.

"Linux programming" on the other hand returns informative guides, overviews and various cook books and bibles.

Plus your assertation that there is more Windows programmers than *nix programers is rediculous. Every organisation I have ever been in, the Windows team is about 1/4 the size of the *nix team working on backend custom apps (like 99% of programmers in the world do).

Of course the fact that you write for a Windows programming site (one of the gems in the Windows world) doesn't colour your opinion at all does it?

Re:Windows programming is purposely vague..

[Skim123]

I offer at least my anecdotal evidence that it has been far easier to find relevant information when programming for linux than Windows

Just like a lawyer would probably tell an accountant that it's much easier for them to find legal briefs than it is to find tax code regulations.

Plus your assertation that there is more Windows programmers than *nix programers is rediculous. Every organisation I have ever been in, the Windows team is about 1/4 the size of the *nix team working on backend custom apps (like 99% of programmers in the world do).

Sum up the total number of Windows applications throughout the world and you don't think that they far outweigh those of *nix? How many *nix programs do you find at your local store vs. how many Windows programs? Someone's gotta me writing those Windows programs.

I dunno, I don't have any solid stats that point to there definitively being more Windows programmers in the world vs. *nix programmers, I speak only from what seems to be obvious emperical evidence. However, that may be simply because that's the world I live in.

Regardless, this thread has gotten a bit off track. The original post was about how Windows programmers are a bunch of "money-first, screw this sharing/collaborating thing," which I still hold is patently false.

Browse info for g++?

[Catamaran]

VS has some very esoteric features, but I love the integrated browse info. It's better than ctags/etags because it uses the compiler to generate the info. Has anyone here thought about doing something similar with g++/gdb? There are a couple of ways it could be done.

• have g++ generate tags
• have an application to build tags from gdb-enabled binaries.

Re:Browse info for g++?

[yamla]

I'm not quite sure what you mean by integrated browse information, but is this similar to the intellisense-like features of KDevelop?

Re:Browse info for g++?

[mystran]

Can we also have GDB make small source-level modifications to a running binary, like Visual Studio debugger did last time I used it. (Disclaimer: it's a few years ago, they might have removed it since.)

Re:Browse info for g++?

[dkf]

Assume I've been living under a rock for a while: what is this "integrated browse info" of which you speak? How is integrated? What info are you browsing? Why is using the compiler to generate it a good idea? How would this differ from having a small script to post-process the output of 'nm' run over the generated object files?

Re:Browse info for g++?

[Catamaran]

By browse information I mean the ability to navigate the source code. I don't know about KDevelop. Does it use the compiler to generate tags or does it use something (like ctags) that uses hueristics and doesn't completely parse the code? There are lots of IDEs with integrated source navigation, but do any besides VS actually uses the compiler to parse the code and generate the tags?

Re:Browse info for g++?

[Catamaran]

If you use Emacs or vi or etc. you can navigate the source code by creating "tag" files which are cross-references between variable names and the source code lines where they are defined. VS has a similar, but more powerful, feature called Browse Info. Systems that use hueristics instead of using a compiler to generate the tags (or Browse Info) are not as accurate. nm does not give source (line) info, but your idea of post-processing (perhaps with gdb or addr2line or something) is similar to what I was hinting at above.

Re:Browse info for g++?

[cahiha]

Can we also have GDB make small source-level modifications to a running binary, like Visual Studio debugger did last time I used it.

No, but there is at least one open source debugger that does let you do just that, and it's been around for about 15 years (check the comp.sources.* archives; it should still be there).

I think most developers concluded it's not worth the effort: so many C++ bugs leave the program in an undefined state, that there is no point in supporting fix-and-continue.

Development environments for languages like Python and Java do, of course, let you modify the source code on the fly.

Re:Browse info for g++?

[Catamaran]

Eclipse is very nice. It looks like the C++ plug-in (CDT) uses a C/C++ parser written in Java. The parser is mostly, but not completely, compatible with gcc. See http://download.eclipse.org/tools/cdt/docs/specs/D esign_Specs/Parser/Parser-2.0-Design.pdf.

Re:Browse info for g++?

[dkf]

Thanks for that. I know now not to get excited over it. :-D

It occurred to me that the usual technique used by us C hackers (tags + nm + grep + a sane coding style) might not work too well in languages with argument-type polymorphism (e.g. C++ or Java). Of course, I also suspect that the complexity of C++ means that such tools are required too (templates, operator overloading and very loose binding between filenames and class/function names would make this a tricky task for simpler approaches, yes?)

Yeah, but....

[Anonymous Coward]

Can it be hacked to use GCC as the compiler?

Re:Yeah, but....

[whopis]

quite easily, actually

Re:Yeah, but....

[quanticle]

How?

Re:Yeah, but....

[Anonymous Coward]

Open the .dsp file. Near the top you will find something like:

# Begin Project
# PROP AllowPerConfigDependencies 0
# PROP Scc_ProjName
CPP=cl.exe
MTL=midl.exe
RSC=rc.exe

Change "cl.exe" to your favorite C++ compiler.

Re:Yeah, but....

[Xyrus]

In a word, yes.

I did something similar for Visula Studio 6 when I was working on a project for a couple of embedded platforms.

VS .NET can be customized as well. Better yet, you coiuld write a plugin app that would take advantage of all the settings and translate them to their gcc equivalents.

It just depends on how much time you want to take.

~X~

Torrent Link

[OsirisX11]

Anyone got one?

Re:Torrent Link

[eight and a quarter]

buy an education or evaluation of visual studio. i'm not sure if they have it, but i used vb back when i was about to graduate high school ~2000-2001. its worth a try.. it might compile code and everything, but won't do anything the few thousand dollar version does.

dont trust visual studio links in your e-mail for $20

Re:Torrent Link

[Pop69]

So, is this copy of Visual Studio 2005 I got free from some company called Microsoft in Germany a dud then ?

That explains a lot of things about it !!!!!

Re:Torrent Link

[OsirisX11]

Torrent link for the BOOK.

Re:Torrent Link

[Anonymous Coward]

Sadly you have to be a MSDN subscriber to get Visual Studio 2005 Beta, but the Express editions are available free of charge for everybody. They are basically the same as Visual Studio, but only implement one language (i.e. Visual C++ Express, Visual C# Express, Visual J# Express, etc). They are in beta, so there are a few bugs here and there. Overall they are pretty damn good.

I only use the compiler, not IDE because

[Anonymous Coward]

I found Source Insight. Beats anything I've tried including slickedit, multiedit, and understand for c++. And don't judge the editor by website screenshots alone, it looks like the color scheme and font styles were put together by a disgruntled employee.

The ONLY gripe about Source Insight is the lack of vim compatible keybindings. I'm hoping the next version of vim will make it even easier for IDE vendors to integrate vi functionality.

BTW, the Visual Studio 2003 IDE is different from prior versions and the 2005 version will be different yet again. Something to keep in mind before investing a lot of time learning it. But the C++ compiler is a vast improvement over VC++ 6.0.

Re:I only use the compiler, not IDE because

[speedbump]

And don't judge the editor by website screenshots alone, it looks like the color scheme and font styles were put together by a disgruntled employee.

I googled Source Insight, went to their web page, and clicked around until I found screenshots. The color scheme is hideous, so, no thanks on using that product. Hmmm, they must know that their app looks like ass, because they don't have a screenshots link on the front page.

Recommend: Best Kept Secrets in .NET

[eltoyoboyo]

I highly recommend

Best Kept Secrets in .NET
by Deborah Kurata

This has plenty of good tricks for visual studio:

Chapter 1 - Hidden Treasures in Visual Studio
Chapter 2 - Doing Windows Forms
Chapter 3 - Code Tricks
Chapter 4 - Much ADO
Chapter 5 - Defensive Development

Whaaat?!

[RazorRaiser]

Adaptability? From none other than Microsoft? I call shenanigans.

Re:Your number one IDE

[EvanED]

Yes, because GOD KNOWS that if you type a standards compliant program into VC++, it won't compile.

(Okay, I know that it's not actually fully compliant. For instance, until 7.1, there was no support for partial template specialization. However, there is, to my knowledge, one fully compliant compiler+library implementation, and VC++ is as good as most now.)

Re:Your number one IDE

[DaHat]

I tend to work on code in Visual Studio 6 at least once a month that still works just fine here, ~10 years after its release.

But even when it comes to VS2003, last time I checked C# and .NET for example were based on EMCA standards, standards which have been implemented for use under Linux, MacOS and others, all making it possible for you to build an application in VS2003 and have it run on other systems.

The biggest annoyance with DevStudio

[DrXym]

Is the the help system. I don't program Windows CE, but it's infested with stupid bloody WinCE specific help. Search for a Win32 function such as CreateWindow and often you're lead to the WinCE implementation. And the same for ATL & MFC classes. Worse is if you chose not to install the WinCE help at all since it still includes the index to the WinCE help. So double clicking on a help item prompts you to insert a CD. Filtering helps a bit but not a great deal since often you want to search anywhere, especially if your app spans Win32 and .NET for instance.

Even with this annoyance it's still better than help in XCode on the Mac. XCode 2.x is a big improvement but it's still hopeless compared to MSDE.

A second annoyance to DevStudio is the sheer mess of dockable windows. VC98 had it just about under control but since DevStudio 2002 it has become a disaster zone of tabs, splitters, pushpins, floaters and toolbars. Just trying to get all the relevant information onto the screen is hard enough. The pushpin model just works badly - either you pin a window to a frame or it annoys you by floating in and out at just the wrong point in time such as when you're mousing around.

A final irritation is that DevStudio is extremely primitive compared to a lot of Java suites. Eclipse is hopeless for visual design but it kicks DevStudio around the shop for sheer coding. Being able to hit Shift+Ctrl+R and rename all references to a class or variable everywhere in Eclipse is mindbogglingly useful. While I expect the next incarnation of DevStudio will allow you to rename a class, it's notable by its absence in the current releases. It's not like Eclipse just introduced this feature since JBuilder has had it for years.

Re:The biggest annoyance with DevStudio

[skraps]

Alt+E+F+S. Check the boxes for "match case" and "match whole word". Not quite as accurate but it works the same for 99% of the cases.

Re:The biggest annoyance with DevStudio

[shird]

I agree entirely with this sentiment about WinCE. You can use filters in MSDN to get rid of it, but its damn near impossible to do it properly. They tried to fix it with the lateset release of MSDN library (on disc Im talking about) by having a 'Desktop and Server OS' filter, but unfortuantly it also filters all the Web stuff and scripting etc which is annoying. Every search requires twice as much effort thanks to WinCE documentation.

Re:The biggest annoyance with DevStudio

[skraps]

A also agree that it is annoying, but in most cases the documentation is near identical for the CE version. I just use the CE docs unless I have reason to think they are different for some particular function.

Re:The biggest annoyance with DevStudio

[rblum]

Thank Bjarne Stroustroup for the fact that there's no refactoring support for C++.

Bascially, the grammar of C++ is such a pain to parse that only very few people manage to write a decent parser - and those guys work for the compiler vendors.

Throw in the obstacles that CPP style macros generate (there are a couple of theses on just this topic!), and the pain is not worth the gain.

Re:The biggest annoyance with DevStudio

[WillAffleckUW]

Have to agree the Help system has a really really bad habit of bringing up useless WinCE help instead of what one is coding for - wish it would figure out from the Project that you DON'T want to code for WinCE and not bother you with extraneous carp like that.

And I also find the dockable windows do make it easy to get lost - or figure out which one disappeared.

Renaming references quickly is, admittedly, not very good, especially if you have code snippets that use them - it would be nice if it could at the very least pop up a WhatAboutThisCode window that you could use to find the other references from and make sure they comply, at the very least.

Re:The biggest annoyance with DevStudio

[Tim Browse]

Thank Bjarne Stroustroup for the fact that there's no refactoring support for C++.

While we're there, we should probably thank him for designing and creating one of the most popular and successful programming languages on the planet.

If we're being fair ;-)

Re:The biggest annoyance with DevStudio

[rblum]

If we're really being fair - it's popular by default, not by virtue. The reason C++ took off was that it was (sorta, kinda) OO, and (drumroll!) backwards compatible with C.

On pure language merits, it's a poor language - Objective C is (IMHO) a better successor by far.

But if you (like Stroustroup does) consider backwards compatibility your main goal, C++ is indeed a great achievement.

Re:The biggest annoyance with DevStudio

[rblum]

Uh, let me clarify this: "Language Merits" as defined by me. Other people might consider different things more important. For me, the ease of writing a parser is of prime importance - and that's really the big shortcoming of C++.

Re:The biggest annoyance with DevStudio

[cpu_fusion]

>"Eclipse is hopeless for visual design"

Ever try the Visual Editor for Eclipse?
http://www.eclipse.org/ve/

It's quite nice.

Re:The biggest annoyance with DevStudio

[AaronBrethorst]

I just talked with the program manager who owns our help system and he promised me that we've fixed the first issue you describe in VS 2005. You can filter out specific blocks of content now, which will enable you to get rid of the WinCE-specific help.

Also, you can now get content via the Internet or through the Local Help system, which means that you shouldn't ever run into "please insert a cd" messages again.

As far as our Tool Window situation goes, we have a way to go on improving this. I think we're doing better in terms of window management in Whidbey (VS 2005) than we did in previous releases. One cool new feature, the IDE Navigator (Ctrl+Tab) lets you navigate between every open document and tool window in the IDE in a fairly reasonable manner.

Also, we've added in either 5 or 6 refactorings to VS: you can perform operations like Extract Method or Rename Symbol now through that interface.

Finally, if you have feature requests or bug reports please post them on our Product Feedback Center. I happened to run across this post, but there's no guarantee that a Slashdot post will ever be seen by the team that owns a specific part of VS. The MSDN Product Feedback Center will let you submit issues or suggestions to us directly and will guarantee they're routed to the right people.

Cheers -- Aaron

Oh yeah, and I feel like I owe a VS "hack" now. When you're in the editor you can enable incremental search by pressing Ctrl+i and then typing a string to search for. The next instance can be jumped to by pressing Ctrl+i again.

Re:The biggest annoyance with DevStudio

[fangread]

To avoid the WinCE help annoynace, you can remove manully all WinCE index files including dv_vcce4.hxi dv_vccelng4.hxi dv_wceatl4.hxi dv_wcecrt4.hxi dv_wcemfc4.hxi and all others wce*.hxi file.

Re:The biggest annoyance with DevStudio

[Xyrus]

You know, there is a help filter for a reason.

~X~

Re:The biggest annoyance with DevStudio

[professorfalcon]

Interesting, but I think I still prefer CTRL-F, enter text, , , F3.

Re:The biggest annoyance with DevStudio

[Malc]

Methinks there was a coup by the UI people from Visual InterDev when Visual Studio was being developed. I shudder at my memories of accidentally launching VI instead of MSVC6.

I should probably follow one of your links for feedback... I wonder if there's any way Visual Studio can more intelligently figure out where the source files are. I work on some products that we develop in MSVC6, but I always debug them in VS.Net 2003 (better debugger). When I step in to things like MFC, ATL or STL files it always loads the VS.Net ones... so I have to close them, go and search through the file system and open the MSVC6 one, and double-click on the top of the stack before continuing to debug. I thought the compiler put source file information in the debug files, or is it just relative paths or something?

Seeing as we're sharing hacks, this is my favourite one. Add the following environmental variable to get the function names when stepping through Windows' DLLs (watch out: Slashdot will probably some spaces to this) or for just trying to figure out some context leading up to a crash when looking at the stack:
_NT_SYMBOL_PATH=symsrv*symsrv.dll*c:\localcache*ht tp://msdl.microsoft.com/download/symbols

Re:The biggest annoyance with DevStudio

[AaronBrethorst]

VID's not that bad ;-). As far as debugging goes, symcaching and the symbol server features are soooo frigging cool. I know I sound like a total dork for saying that, but it's true. For debugger feedback, you can either post a suggestion on the MSDN Product Feedback Center, or ask a question on the official VS Debugger forum.

Re:The biggest annoyance with DevStudio

[Malc]

Ever tried using TweakUI with its X-Mouse enabled? VID was the first app that misbehaved with it. That's okay, I didn't have to use it. VS.Net picked up the bad habits and forced me to go back to Windows' normal mouse behaviour. Why? Everytime the mouse goes over the app window it pops to the front, making things extremely frustrating.

Re:The biggest annoyance with DevStudio

[WasterDave]

XCode 2.x is a big improvement but it's still hopeless compared to MSDE.

Agreed on that. Have you tried AppKiDo though? Very useful little thing.

Dave

Re:The biggest annoyance with DevStudio

[DrXym]

Yes I use VE all the time - that was in fact was I was referring to. If you've watched as it has mangled one of your classes beyond all hope of repair, or spent close to a minute after a simple operation like renaming a panel, or locked up entirely, you'd know why I said it.

Of course Java doesn't help either. Part of the problem for VE is that Java doesn't have a simple XY layout model, forcing anyone who wants to write a visual editor to support the box, flow, grid, gridbag etc. layouts. Trying to create a dialog in VE (even when you know what you're doing) is magnitude harder than DevStudio because of it. What VE *really* needs is an XY mode and a button that tries to translate that design to the gridbag layout afterwards.

Re:The biggest annoyance with DevStudio

[shird]

But when you do a search for "SendMessage" or whatever API, when there is only one match, it opens that match. When there is more than one match, it shows the search results which you then have to click. With the Win CE documentation included, there are effectively two results for every core windows API function - which means extra hurdles to jump through everytime you want to look up an API function. (ie you have to search then click the results, rather than just search. Plus the native windows version is much better as far as doco is concerned, and often has examples, headers to use, .libs to include etc - which is different for CE)

Re:The biggest annoyance with DevStudio

[dkf]

Part of the problem for VE is that Java doesn't have a simple XY layout model

Actually it does. Set the layout manager to null and you can put components at any location you want and set the size to anything you want. Of course, if you've got the ability to change font sizes (e.g. to support people with visual difficulties, which is a legal requirement in some places) then absolute layouts suck horribly...

Re:The biggest annoyance with DevStudio

[DrXym]

Well you learn something new everyday! Cheers

Re:The biggest annoyance with DevStudio

[copypaste]

About those pushpin dockable windows, they also drove me crazy until I found out that if you hold down ctrl while you're moving one, it won't dock. I use both Eclipse and VS.NET every day and also find Eclipse to be a lot more powerful, even though it's not as fast, mainly because of how well it "knows" your code and makes use of this knowledge.

Re:The biggest annoyance with DevStudio

[skraps]

I normally put the cursor in a keyword and hit F1 to use the help system. When I do that, it just takes me to the first hit -- which is usually the CE version. It seems to be only when using the index directly that the search hits box comes up.

Re:The biggest annoyance with DevStudio

[AaronBrethorst]

Hitting Escape seems to dismiss the mode just fine too. I hadn't ever thought about pressing an Arrow key. thanks.

Re:The biggest annoyance with DevStudio

[cerelib]

I have had problems with eclipse visual editing, but I found an alternative. The newest NetBeans IDE has the best visual editor for Java that I have ever seen. But for everything else eclipse blows it away. For non-gui coding go eclipse, for gui go NetBeans.

Portability

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

For making non-standards-compliant, non portable, code that wont work in 4 years.

Erm... We write highly portable libraries in C and C++ at work. They have to compile on Windows, Linux, Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, MacOS X, and often under several different toolsets on each OS.

Our whole dev team is free to develop using whatever software we find helpful. We have GUI guys and CLI guys, Windows guys and Linux guys, emacs guys and vi guys, etc.

The one thing almost everyone has in common is that they use Visual C++ as their primary IDE. That's not because we're ill-informed or haven't tried the alternatives, it's because most of us think it's the best IDE available to help us do our jobs.

Is it all about other tools?

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

A book on Visual Studio hacks has a lot going for it, but the examples in the review mostly sound like discussion of add-in tools, rather than VS itself.

Many people don't take advantage of even simple things like customising autoexp.dat for debugging, and don't know about undocumented UI tweaks like displaying a marker line at column N. Many of these little touches are what makes VS better than the alternatives for a lot of jobs, and why Microsoft never makes more of them I don't understand. Are things like the two examples above covered in the book?

Re:Is it all about other tools?

[JamesAvery]

There is a pretty good balance between IDE features and add-ins and tools in the book, if you take a look at the Table of Contents you can get a better feel for what is included. (The Guidlines hack you refer to is included)

Re:Is it all about other tools?

[ojQj]

OK, you've got me interested. How do I display a marker line at column N?

Re:Is it all about other tools?

[NavyShirt]

I googled and found instructions here.

Re:Why is this relevant?

[WillAffleckUW]

Why is a book about an MS IDE relevant in the Open Source age of Eclipse?

Because, contrary to those on the Dev sites, not everyone is using Eclipse yet.

So long as there is moderate marketshare, I think it's geeky enough for slashdot to post about, IMHO.

Re:Crappy IDE

[RLiegh]

No; real programmers move the bits around telekinetically. Of course, if you're one of those windows-using dandies I suppose you can always use "copy con" ....

Re:Why is this relevant?

[hizziaips]

Because......many developers (myself included) like Visual Studio and think it's better for Windows C/C++/C# development than Eclipse.

Tomato...

[xtracto]

I remember when I programmed in Visual Studio there was a good add on called Visual Assist, the company is Whole Tomato I used like 3 years ago and it was quite nice, it adds some features to the IDE that make coding easier.

Re:Tomato...

[FrozedSolid]

Visual Assist X adds some KILLER features. Namely:
Automatic case repairing
E.g. if you have int theCount; and later on you type thecount=5; it'll automatically change it to theCount=5;

Intellisense that actually works.
You'll notice if you coe anything that's not like a regular gui app, the intellisense will just not list half of your identifiers and functions. I found this to be pretty annoying when I was coding a C++ SDL game. Visual Assist X fixes it.

Spell Check
I had a professor that would take huge points off my projects where i had just spelled stuff in the comments wrong. Spellcheck can be a lifesaver.

It does a whole lot more too, check it out.

Re:Tomato...

[kabz]

Yeah I have to acknowledge Visual Assist too.

I help maintain a huge C++/SQL code base for oil and gas apps, and being able to intelligently traverse across apis, files, etc., makes my job a lot easier.

The big thing about Visual Assist is that it doesn't restrict itself to your current project, so you can see stuff included in other projects and jump to them.

VA is one of the first pieces of software that our coders get setup on their machines. Highly reccomended.

Re:Tomato...

[cthrall]

Can't say enough good things about the product and company...the product is worth every cent and support is quick and helpful.

Re:Tomato...

[Wizarth]

As every-one else is saying, Visual Assist X is the bomb. One of the things I like that no-one else has mentioned is much improved syntax highlighting, including in the tool-tips and other places.

Re:Book should read

[Anonymous Coward]

You misspelled emacs

Re:One more...

[akac]

Yeah, because that happens...hm, never. I use both OS X and Windows XP and prefer OS X, but I have to say that I've had to hard reboot my OS X machine more than my WinXP machine and the WinXP machine being my development machine has more junk on it, while I keep my OS X machine clean of ANY non-Apple kernel extensions as well as other hacks into the system (i.e. no APE).

Re:Crappy IDE

[ReluctantRefactorer]

Which version are you refering to?

All versions after 1.5 are pretty bloated for sure, but version 6 + service packs I have found to be very stable. About the only consistent way I found to crash it was conditional breakpoints watching memory locations. Guaranteed blow-up after a few iterations. Maybe they've fixed it in SP6?

Of course, Visual Studio 7.1 is a different kettle of fish. Very buggy and quite nasty. And they've ruined the IDE by making it too "VB friendly" and actually removing some of the useful features in 6

Sure

[Skiron]

Do you really wish to exit and not save 23 hours of work - this may cause problems in unsaved work?

[OK]

Hacking add-ins in perl

[MeerCat]

So I normally prefer to use emacs as my IDE, especially for anything complex, but for those times when I need to use Visual Studio I've been getting a little bored with the standard tools so hacked together an add-in (not just the tools or macros, but the proper add-in mechanism) framework entirely in perl... suddenly I can knock up simple reg-exp based editor tools and I don't need to descend to some crappy VB/C# level coding to do so...

But has anyone noticed what a complete mess the Visual Studio add-in API is ? A hybrid mixture of DLL export functions and nearly-COM like objects... very 1993... I think it must count as the biggest hack in Visual Studio.

zerg

[Lord Omlette]

If Visual Studio isn't your bag, but you still like Visual C++, then grab the Visual C++ 2003 toolkit (just the compiler, free) and stick Code::Blocks on top of it.

Rebooting WinXP or OS X due to VS

[WillAffleckUW]

Well, actually WinXP does occassionally lock up or need to be rebooted, but admittedly it is very very rare.

Most of the time it's because we've left a dev machine on for more than a week and it's run out of magic juju or whatever.

For non-server development machines, which may reference leaky objects, it's a good idea to shut them down periodically, after a graceful exit from all apps. If you do that, the only problem is Norton Anti-virus will complain it isn't protecting your machine - because it wasn't the first to boot up - think the MSFT Antispyware beta takes first pole and shoves other startup programs to run after it, your typical Non-MSFT programs must run later, even though it shouldn't do that.

Related book.

[MythMoth]

This is more in-depth than you might expect:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0596 003609/

Re:Only on Slashdot

[decipher_saint]

I've been a Visual Studio user for a long time now (both VS.NET and previous versions all the way back to 4.x). Visual Studio is pretty good but it's still not even close to Eclipse. Everything you like in VS.NET has been in Eclipse longer, is much more polished and gives you more power all around (customizable).

And as to the parent troll about Microsoft documentation, well that might have been true ages ago I find that most Windows API stuff is easy enough to find on MSDN, the documentation for .NET is very easy to navigate and is comperable (and better in some places) than the online Java APIs.

What MS stuff can't the guy find docs for, that's what I'd like to know.

Most Requested VS Hack

[RagingChipmunk]

How about getting the scroll wheel to work in VS6???

That would be such a productivity improvement!

Re:Most Requested VS Hack

[JamesAvery]

You can download an add-in to provide scroll wheel functionality in VS6.

http://support.microsoft.com/Default.aspx?id=83791 0

Re:Most Requested VS Hack

[aztracker1]

No kidding, lol.. had to modify a VB6 project a few weeks back, and threw me that scrolling the source view didn't work... maybe in sp7 if ever.

Re:Most Requested VS Hack

[Danga]

hmm the scroll wheel works fine in my copy of VS6. My mouse is a microsoft mouse, maybe that is why I don't know.

Re:Most Requested VS Hack

[Hecatonchires]

I love you. Seriously. You can touch me.

According to review ...

[Anonymous Coward]

"Also, readers won't have to worry about buying a book which will be outdated when Microsoft releases its next version of Visual Studio in November. Tips and tricks are included for Visual Studio versions 2002, 2003, and 2005. "

Re:Crappy IDE

[aztracker1]

You might want to try SharpDevelop then, for your .Net projects, I actually like it better than VS.Net for many projects... for asp.net, I will use crimson editor for the .aspx files, and #dev for codebehind (compiled)... just my own take on this...

When working with others though, it's best to use what everyone can "get along" with, which usually comes down to MS-VS... just a suggestion though...

What about 6.0?

[DogDude]

Too bad it doesn't mention 6.0. That's what I still use for everything. Completely compatible (that's what MS is good for), and it does everything I need it to do. No need to drop the $$ for anything newer...

Re:Only on Slashdot

[aztracker1]

Well, VS6 was pretty feature complete a while ago, before Eclipse even existed. I'd also like to know what he's having so much trouble with in regards to finding it in MSs documentation... some of the internals aren't there obviously, but are rarely needed outside of driver development, and MS makes that available under NDA.

What does Microsoft use?

[Team_America]

Ironically, most devs at Microsoft don't use Visual Studio at all to build software. For them, it's all command line all the time, plus whatever editor you feel like using. All the compilation scripts are built by hand, and access to source is highly compartmentalized. You only get access to what you need to know to build your product.

Re:What does Microsoft use?

[ninja_assault_kitten]

Who the hell told you that?

I've done my time at MS and that statement is completely false. While different people have different preferences (even at MS), VS is still the IDE of choice for most of us. At least when we're writing code for MS-based operating environments.

Re:What does Microsoft use?

[Procyon101]

I've been on a few teams here at MS, and I must say that the source isn't that hard to get too. Now getting WRITE permissions too it is a pain, but right now I can see all the source to SQL, most of the source to the CLR and VS, some of office, some Windows, and I'm sure anything else could be gotten by just asking. (if it exists... I was looking for diamond.exe source a couple weeks ago to fix an AV we keep getting and apparently no one has compiled that thing since '96 and we couldn't find it.)

Re:VB's not dead

[knewter]

Bah, VB.NET removes (again) the compile cycle for VB.NET debugging, so the main flaw VB.NET has over previous versions (slightly less RAD) goes away. And VB.NET is WAY more powerful than VB6 was, so just sit tight and wait for the next version. It's no Rails, but it's much better than what those of us stuck coding in .NET have now....

not that again

[cahiha]

You may like Visual Studio. Good for you, keep on using it.

Other people prefer Eclipse, and arguably, Eclipse has long surpassed Visual Studio both in terms of UI and in terms of functionality.

Yet other people find Emacs a far better tool.

And, frankly, compared to the environments people had 20 years ago for Smalltalk and Lisp, all those tools still seem extremely cumbersome.

Visual Studio may be Microsoft's "ultimate killer app", but that's because people like you don't know how to work with anything else, not because it is actually better in any absolute sense.

Re:not that again

[EvanED]

Other people prefer Eclipse, and arguably, Eclipse has long surpassed Visual Studio both in terms of UI and in terms of functionality.

The Java development features surpass VS, but VS has a couple things working for it:

1. C++ support is still better than Eclipse + CDT. VS 2005 will have refactoring support, CDT doesn't appear to. (The refactoring menu is at least empty.) You can't even rename an identifier let alone do many of the more complex refactoring tasks. (Disclaimer: I haven't tried the prereleases of CDT 3. They could support refactoring.) It won't autoformat code. (This time I'm pretty sure CDT 3 *will* support that.)

2. If you want a GUI designer, Eclipse doesn't help you at all.

Re:not that again

[cahiha]

Yes, VisualStudio and Eclipse are targetted at different languages. But we can also just ask the question: if you are free to choose your language, which is the better IDE? And I think it's pretty clear that Eclipse is. (Incidentally, there are GUI designer plug-ins for Eclipse.)

Re:not that again

[EvanED]

But we can also just ask the question: if you are free to choose your language, which is the better IDE? And I think it's pretty clear that Eclipse is.

With the release of VS 2005 (with at least some refactoring support, I don't know how much, I haven't used it) I don't think that either has a clear advantage over the other.

(And, incidentally, I hate programming in Java with a passion and would gladly program in C++ with, say, Notepadd++ as my sole editor before Eclipse in Java on most projects. But that's because of a ton of beefs I have with the Java language as defined and a number of (IMHO) limitations Java has rather than the IDE, so is incidental to this discussion.)

Incidentally, there are GUI designer plug-ins for Eclipse.

Really? Can you link some? What language/toolkit? I'd love to see them.

I should make it clear that I think Eclipse is wonderful and all, and it's by far and away the best free IDE I know, but I would say that, even if you compare C++ or C# (or VB, but we won't mention that again) under VS 2005 to Java under Eclipse, the tables are pretty much even.

Re:not that again

[cahiha]

Really? Can you link some? What language/toolkit? I'd love to see them.

Just look on eclipse.org and/or eclipseplugincentral.com; there are several (WindowBuilder, Jigloo, etc.).

but I would say that, even if you compare C++ or C# (or VB, but we won't mention that again) under VS 2005 to Java under Eclipse, the tables are pretty much even.

Just that would be amazing in and of itself. But I think Eclipse actually goes further because of the plugins. Eclipse is where all the research on software development environments is happening, and it's the tool many vendors build on these days.

MS conflict of interest

[dustmite]

I think you missed the point. I've used MSDN a lot, and have for many years, and while there is a lot of documentation, it is frequently blatantly incorrect. The problem is so bad that I eventually also came to the conclusion that MS must be doing it on purpose, in order to slow down other ISVs. Microsoft actually has a huge fundamental "conflict of interest" - they are both an ISV for the Windows platform, and a major supplier of development tools to other ISVs for the Windows platform. In other words, they are supposed to make "quality development tools" for their own competition.

Offtopic Flamebait question

[GojiraDeMonstah]

What are people using VisualStudio for, really? I understand it's popular among the corporate IT internal project set, but is it being used for any commercial apps? I haven't seen any (non-Microsoft utility) that runs using the .NET VM. What is out there that has been developed with it?

Re:Offtopic Flamebait question

[Procyon101]

VS includes the entire IDE, not just .NET, so all C++, VB, j++, .NET, GUI Editor, etc is included. I would have to guess that almost EVERY mainstream windows product uses VS in some way nowdays.

Re:Offtopic Flamebait question

[gromitcode]

lol, gotta laugh, picking on someone for not mentioning there company and then not even having the balls to post using a name. guess that makes you even more mediocre as well as being a hipocrite.

Re:The basic flaw in this logic

[Procyon101]

1) HUH?!? MS has alot of features which leave Linux in the dust. That said, the opposite is also true. The OS's have traditionally had different focuses.

2) Linux devs continually release horribly insecure code also. Many studies have shown they rank pretty close to the same in "unintended" security holes. IE is a special case as it it a hole by design ;)

3) Neither can Linux. It's done when it's done. Just because MS puts hard dates down years in advance, doesn't change the fact that it's done when it's done.

Now that being said, using VS to develop for linux seems a stretch... What the hell do they do? Some fancy plug-in to run GCC under cygwin instead of CL.exe, get rid of the project and nmake files in favor of some autotool files, and then use VS as a text editor?? You'd have to be a hardcore MS Freak to go that far, and then why are you developing for Linux anyway??

Here is another review...

[rgelb1]

http://www.vbrad.com/Reviews/books/brVisualStudioH acks.htm

Re:Here is another review...

[rgelb1]

Oops, I gave a bad URL. Here is the right one.

http://www.vbrad.com/pf.asp?p=Reviews/books/brVisu alStudioHacks.htm

To each their own.

[strider44]

This (not yours, P, the general KDevelop vs VS) argument is silly at best. I'd say it even descends to the level of Gimp vs. Photoshop. I love KDevelop, and I also love VS (the best piece of software Microsoft has released ever perhaps). I love the intellisense and the VS6.0 interface, but I also love the automatic syntax error correction in KDevelop.

The IDEs are two different things with surprisingly different feature sets and ways about doing things. If you think one's better than the other then that's just because the extra features that IDE has over the other are more important.

The madness.

[csirac]

It's an OK IDE. I dislike the bracket chasing immensely.

What I hate. Absolutely, brain haemorrhagingly hate - is its tendancy to somehow corrupt my .vcproj files such that the debugger doesn't work. At all. Ever.

It comes up: "Microsoft Development Enviornment: Unable to attach to machine ."

How do I know it's a problem with the .vcproj file? Because deleting it, recreating the project, re-adding all the files "cures" the problem. For a while. Also, this "cancer" only affects certain projects at any one time until I re-create the project files. Other projects will enter debugging just fine.

I have spent _HOURS_ trying to fix this problem. When I really should be refactoring some crusty C++ code, instead I'm trying to get this bastard bullshit debugger to work. The most information I could find on the 'net, was some problem with version conflicts with the MS .NET framework, there was a random post on some forum with instructions to create a crazy XML config file in the same directory as some random .exe file but the only occurance of this file I had was in MS Office Program Files...

I tried, I really tried to use MS VC, and I understand that surely I am one of only a very few people in the whole world that have this problem. It was the same story on other PCs at my work, but they all use the same Corporate Image so who knows where the problem actually lies.

My solution was to install cygwin and create a set of Makefiles for GCC and use gdb for debugging, MS VC 7.1 for the final release builds.

What is the point of this post? I wish I had this book handy when I was going through this. There was absolutely _NO FRAPPING CLUE_ as to how I could have possibly fixed my problem. Nothing in any event log, I even pored over sysinternal's "filemon" real-time trace logs to get a clue as to what was happening (or not)... but I was totally lost.

Now I know how diehard windows geeks feel trying to get any work done on Linux...

ASP.net and sourcesafe.

[fishlet]

I've used Studio 2003 new for the last year and a half. Overall I like it alot and wish I had a linux equivilent (monodevelop has SOOOOOOOO far to go). The only thing I hate hate hate hate (x1000) is it's lousy integration with source safe when it comes to ASP.net projects. Ever try moving a web project from one location to another? Or try to get a un-source controlled copy of your project. Good luck, it's possible but excruciatingly painful.

Just my $1 and 2 cents.

Re:ASP.net and sourcesafe.

[sjlutz]

Might get me flamed but:
Move Web Project
File Menu
Source Control Item
Change Source Control Menu Item
Remove Source Control Bindings
Rebind to new project

Get UnSource Controlled Copy
Open Project
Get Latest Version (if you want it)
File Menu
Source Control Menu Item
Remove Source Control Bindings
Done - you now have an un-source controlled copy.

Re:ASP.net and sourcesafe.

[cahiha]

Overall I like it alot and wish I had a linux equivilent (monodevelop has SOOOOOOOO far to go).

You do: Eclipse.

Re:ASP.net and sourcesafe.

[BigJimSlade]

I fought with SourceSafe for a long time. If you have the means to do so, switch. I've been using Subversion for over a year now, integrating with VS.NET via AnkhSVN. The integration isn't perfect, but the version control is soooooooo much better than VSS. If you want an SCC-compatible SCM system, I've heard good things about Vault (haven't used it myself, though)

Re:ASP.net and sourcesafe.

[fishlet]

I've tried the above, with partial success.
For some reason that I can't possibly imagine why, my VS insists on checking out the projects first before letting you unbind them. Which is kinda tough when your on a team where others got some of those checked out. I've successfully gone in ,cleared the read-only bits form the .vbproj files before to get around this but it's a PITA when the solution you've got has some 40 projects in it.

Re:The basic flaw in this logic

[amliebsch]

What the hell do they do? Some fancy plug-in to run GCC under cygwin instead of CL.exe, get rid of the project and nmake files in favor of some autotool files, and then use VS as a text editor??

Don't forget that MSIL binaries run natively in Linux with mono. Maybe that's what they use. I know I've found it useful.

mod up!

[jon_c]

Visual Assist is still around and kicking ass. Me and anyone I've worked with uses it like a madman, it practically doubles the efficiency of coding in VC.

some highlights from Visual Assist:
- Even BETTER Intilisense, no needing to create browse file, it instantly just pops up the function and arguments
- Alt+H to instantly goto the definition of anything, a class, variable etc..
- Alt+O to switch between the .h and .cpp versions
- Spell checking in comments
- A pop up window that lists all the open windows with a realtime search.
- Tons more I can't remember.

-Jon

(I am no way affiliated with Whole Tomato Software, I just love this program)

Comparable how?

[Some Random Username]

If you mean comparable as in full documentation, try a BSD. If you mean comparable as in seperate documentation that you must purchase a subscription to, then no, I don't think you are likely to find such a thing in the open source world.

Re:Comparable how?

[KarmaMB84]

Most of the documentation comes with the dev tools themselves, but you can read what should be the latest revisions for free at MSDN. The MSDN subscription is for the software and other goodies.

One major shortcoming

[TerryDu]

I've tried twice to move to using Visual Studio as my IDE, but everytime I stop and go back to the old IDE when I realize that I can't figure out how to overcome this shortcoming...

I need tags, what MS calls Intellisense I believe, for files not in my project! When I click on a variable, I'd like to know in what file it was declared, and where it's used. When I type a function name, I'd like it to show me the parameters, and in which of my files that function is declared and used.

Visual Studio seems to do this only for files that you've added to your project. However, when you have a large code base for a complex product that has over 1000 files, you don't want to add all the files into your project. Instead, you want to add just the 20 or so files that you're working on at the moment, and then be able to still reference all the other files. I used SlickEdit currently, and it allows me to point to a root source code directory and build tags, which parses through all the source code and creates all the links.

I can't tell you how important this feature is, and how much of a time saver it is! It's critical for large projects, and I'm surprised that Visual Studio still doesn't seem to support this feature, even in the VS 2005 beta.

Perhaps I'm just not aware of the right "hack" to use? I have heard that you can have a VS project link to other projects, or embed them (?), but that seems to imply that someone would have to maintain the 50 or so project files everytime a file is added/removed (or even modified?). And I'm not even sure whether doing this will give you "tags" to the the source files in the other projects?

Being able to quickly browse the file system from within the IDE and viewing source files (without having to bring up a dialog window) is also a really nice feature when working on large projects.

As odd as it sounds, it seems MS Visual Studio isn't geared towards really large projects. I've heard MS uses it for their own products and OS, but I'm not sure how they do so.

Terry

Re:One major shortcoming

[oncebitten]

how about using doxygen? although it's not integrated into the IDE, and i'm not sure there's probably a windows port for it.

I find it very useful for browsing variable references/uses.

Since it just generates HTML docs, it probably could be integrated into VS (or just use your web browser).

Re:One major shortcoming

[NDaxi]

For this issue, you can use Whole Tomato's Visual AssistX. It works on every version of VS that MS released. Link: http://www.wholetomato.com/

Re:One major shortcoming

[orion41us]

I think if you highlight the variable tyhen right-click there is something like "goto definition" option that will jump to the declaration of the variable... works for functions too..

Re:One major shortcoming

[TerryDu]

> how about using doxygen? This is good, and we have something like this already. As soon as someone submits a code, it updates an internal web site that references and links our entire code base. So this functionality is available. However, I have to bring up a web browser to use it, and it's outside of the IDE. More importantly, I can't make changes without switching back to the IDE, and then jumping to the correct file and line number.

Re:One major shortcoming

[TerryDu]

Thanks! This looks like it might do exactly what I need, as well as some other things that I needed! Terry

sounds awesome where to d/l is it on sourceforge ?

[bxbaser]

was sarcasm
eom

ok..

[ashpool7]

I can do it in less letters.

ADC

Reluctant fan of Visual Studio .NET

[zaqintosh]

I have always been a java developer, and still work in java today. I do recall a year or two ago I wanted to give c# a try, and was remarkably shocked at how easy to use VS .NETs gui builder was, and speedy the ide was.

I'm afraid I'm still married to the java style of web application development (which is what I work in). Tools I admire are the Tapestry framework, and hibernate... but for the life of me I cannot find a decent IDE!!

Eclipse being the hava posterboy I find terribly flakey. As soon as I installed the spindle plugin (for tapestry) eclipse just became a nightmare of slowness and runtime errors.

It gets even worse when you try and find a free j2ee plugin for eclipse.

MyEclipse although not free seems to do the trick nicely... is there anything else out there?

All I want is an ide that's free and plays nicely with Tapestry , servlets, hibernate, and subversion.

The closest I've come so far is Intellij IDEA... which is leaps and bounds more stable than even the latest eclipse. But unfortunately it's FAR from free.

I'm sure you've all hear this before but I'm getting pretty desperate. right now I have different projects going on different IDE's. (IDEA trial version, Eclipse, Jedit).

bleh what a mess

Re:Reluctant fan of Visual Studio .NET

[Pipedings]

> It gets even worse when you try and find a free j2ee plugin for eclipse. For web apps, did you try Eclipse WST?

The one VS.Net 2003 plug-in I cannot live without

[SpryGuy]

Resharper.

It adds real-time syntax highlighting, additional keyword coloring, superb code navigation features, and code refactoring features, among many other very useful items.

If you are using Visual Studio and doing any C# coding at all, you need to check out Resharper, from JetBrains... http://www.jetbrains.com/resharper/. I frankly don't know how anyone lives without it (or at least something similar).

Version 2.0 (due out late this year) will also support 2005, Visual Basic, and ASP.Net coding

Ah, the pity...

[Hosiah]

I shake my head and marvel...poor, hoodwinked souls who see nothing but .NET and Visual Whatever and think they're on top of the world.

*sigh* The trolls do rush to these threads. Meanwhile, we on the Free Software side enjoy gcc, vi, EMACS, gdb, Python, Perl, Ruby, Bash, Common Lisp, gcj, Tcl/Tk, wish, GTK+, Qt, SDL, curses, SVGA, aa-lib, POVray, Audacity, PHP, XML, assembly, plus our standard C/C++, and all the open example code you could ever ask for, and half the internet full of tutorials, and man pages, info pages, HTML books, and Docbooks full of more documentation than you could read in a lifetime. All for a substantial monetary outlay of $0.00.

And what do people say to this? Dismiss it all with a handwave - Bah! - and stick with BASIC because they already know it. And it's easier.

Well, no arguements there! But I chose not to stick with BASIC. BASIC was fine on the Commodore Vic-20, and QBasic was good for a yuck or two on the Windows 3.1. DOS batch files were a primitive introduction to the beginning of shell scripting concepts. And by the time I got to paying money for Visual C++ Studio after paying more money for the operating system to run it on, knowing that what I wrote with it would run *only* on Windows for all of it's days, and installed it to discover the closest thing to a nightmare I have ever seen conscious and breathing, I asked myself if I was a man or a mouse.

I picked man. I decided to take the brave step where few dare to tread and learn more than the little scraps Windows was feeding me inside my little box it kept me in. After all, I reasoned, if my sole criteria were "easy to use" and "I already know it", then by the same logic I should be still in diapers and crawling on all fours and drinking out of bottles.

Anyway, it's no skin off my nose. So go on, Microsoft serfs, enjoy your little bag of tricks for your script typewriter! Have your fun. Nobody said that we all had to be professionals! And at least you have one thing to brag about - VB makes a damn fine virus writer! Yes, every virus sample I capture in the wild and study with a hex editor, I discover the words "Visual Basic" stamped proudly right on the binary! For our convenience, of course, so we can set up daemons who grep files for that string and delete what they find before we ever see it. They don't call it "trusted computing" for nothing!

Re:Ah, the pity...

[Vegeta99]

That's cool, dude.

Meanwhile, some programmers program for Windows because 90% of the userbase is > 10% of the userbase.

This article is for them, not you. Go back in your crate.

Re:Ah, the pity...

[Tarwn]

I shake my head and marvel...poor, closed-minded souls who se nothing but an MS product and think they are on the top of the world for ridiculing it.

*sigh* The trolls do rush to these threads. Meanwhile we who actually try things before denigrating them have found an extremely capable IDE, enjoying the capability to code in/edit Ada, APL, ASml, Caml, Cobol, Delphi, Forth, Eiffel, Fortran, Haskell, Lisp, Lua, Mercury, Mixal, ML, Mondrian, Nemerle, Oberon, Pascal, Perl, PHP, Prolog, Python, RPG, Ruby, Scheme, Smalltalk, C#, C++, J#, VB.Net, XML, HTML, ASP, ASP.Net, ...

And what do people say to this? Dismiss it all with a handwave - MS Bah! - and stick to their advanced text editors because they know it. And it's easier.

Well, no arguments there! But I chose not to stck to any one language or editor. Knowing only one editor and having only one toolset was fine on the Commodore Vic-20, and unfortunatly Emacs was never as good as vi :). And when I decide to write an application that will only ever run on Windows...or in a web browser...or in mono...I realized that it would actually take a little work to learn a new IDE. I asked myself if I was man or mouse.

I picked man. I decided to take the brave step and actually learn how to use something beyond a text editor. To learn how to make the editor fill my needs instead of assuming it would limit me to only a small subset of projects. After all, I reasoned, if my sole criteria were "easy to use" and "I already know it", then by the same logic I should have never learned how to use even the best text editor (vi).

Anyway, it's no skin off my nose. So go on, Anti-Microsoft serfs, enjoy your little bag of tricks for your script typewriter! Have your fun. Nobody said that we all had to be professionals! And at least you have one thing to brag about - you didn't bother to expand your skillset because it was MS! And continue to dream those fond dreams of catching Virii in the wild, of creating single script solutions to strip them out of messages, of your own advantages over virus writers who clearly can't know more than VB. An example does not define a set, which is why professionals try to understand what they are talking about before they open their mouths.

Re:Ah, the pity...

[Hosiah]

*ping* Gosh, I'm not sure whether to barf or applaud. You never know how a thread's gonna go on Slashie.

PS I don't know where the "just one text editor" thing came from, but anyway, good parody! (In fact, had I known someone would sit down and mock me line by line, I would have posted the Cliff's Notes version. I must have been tedius to study.) Linux has your precious IDE's (Glade, Kdev, etc.), too, there mainly for people who depend on them. As for 90% > 10% userbase...you can code and compile for Windows compatibility on Linux. You can test-run it in a Windows emulator. And (since we're all mimicking each other) 100% of the userbase (Windows and Linux together) > 90% of the userbase (Windows itself).

But anyway, my original post was a followup. I wasn't the first to bring Linux up in this thread. And (as I think I made it clear), I don't have anything against Windows programmers. But I would hope they were making conscious decisions based on experience, and not just staying on the "popularity boat" just because they've heard nothing but rumors about sharks in the water.

*Every* *single* time I've ever asked "Why do you stick with Windows?", the #1 response has always been, "Because everybody else uses it." I never got that, either. Is everybody else rich because of their Windows use? Does everybody else get laid more due to the Windows charisma? Does everybody else have whiter teeth and fresher breath thanks to the extra flouride protection of Windows? For going on ten years, it's been "Everybody uses Windows because everybody uses Windows because everybody uses Windows." Man, when that bubble bursts, I'll remember to duck!

The Delphi parser

[Latent Heat]

Besides being wordy, Pascal has a quirky syntax with semicolon being a statement separator not terminator and the proliferation of begin-end's. Even Wirth left Pascal behind with Modula, Oberon, and now Component Pascal, although Wirth switched to case-sensitive and the newer Wirth languages have keywords in all caps which is so annoying when there are editors that can highlight keywords and a Component Pascal source listing reads like a bad troll.

The deal is that the Turbo Pascal's and later Delphi had such a fast compiler unlike anything else on the planet. The fastest of the bunch is still Delphi 2 which is still my fave, unless I require Delphi 6 or higher for ActiveX development. I always attributed the speed to Pascal, even with Delphi syntax -- the clean syntax made for fast parsers, and the fast compiles made it worthwhile to program in Pascal as opposed to the more modern Pascal-like languages such as Modula 2 or Adda.

But there is a dude who claims that the actual grammer of Delphi is one of life's little mysteries -- there is no simple railroad tracks diagram like the Jensen and Wirth report and the actual syntax may be a Borland trade secret. This is preventing third party tools for Delphi, but it is also scary in terms of the language never having an independent implementation -- Free Pascal makes a stab at Delphi compatibility, but code can take a lot of rework to make it through Free Pascal.

Anyway, if Delphi was really that clean, Delphi grammer could be considered for other uses -- like what we do with XML. While Pascal is not Lisp-simple, I was always thinking that it was much simpler than C/C++ or even Java, but the dude is saying that is not the case and the fast Delphi compiles may have to do more with Anders Hejlsberg than anything intrinsic in the language.

On this subject, I have always thought javac to be dog slow on compiles, but I have compiled stuff with recent versions of Eclipse and wow!, it does complete builds in a blink of an eye in comparison. What is Eclipse using for the Java compiler back end?

Re:The Delphi parser

[Mornelithe]

Javac is written in java, so compiling anything requires firing up a jvm first, which can take a while.

However, since Eclipse is written in java, the jvm is already running, so it can just call up the appropriate javac classes and run the compiler in-process, removing the latency of starting up a new jvm. That's most likely why Eclipse is much more snappy at compiles (off the top of my head; I haven't written any Java in a while).

Alternatively they could be using IBM's jikes compiler, which is written in C or C++, so it also doesn't have the startup requirement of loading a jvm.

Re:The Delphi parser

[Anonymous Coward]

From what I can tell, Eclipse uses its own compiler written in Java (and running within the existing JVM). It seems to be contained in org.eclipse.jdt.core_[version].jar

Re:I HATE VISUAL STUDIO.NET !!!

[PitaBred]

"Why didn't someone taught me Python or Ruby when I was a kid???"

Probably because they wanted to teach you english first?

Just Bought the Book

[Pman1]

I don't care what anyone says, VS is tight.

Tightly integrated that is with SQL Server for example. Need to debug a stored procedure? Set a break point in it using VS and step through it, adding watches and such like if you were debugging C# code for example. Now that is the shiztnizz.

Oh how I wish my company would upgrade both VS and SQL Server, guess I'm stuck with VS 2003 for a while. Sigh... ;)

Re:Just Bought the Book

[Malc]

You can't be stuck with VS 2003 because it is the latest version. There hasn't been a new version of SQL Server for about five years.

Re:Just Bought the Book

[weicco]

Haha. I'm using Visual Studio 2005 beta 2 and SQL Express currently. I had VS 2005 beta 1 and SQL Server 2005 beta on my computer earlier; they weren't big successes I have to admit. But this beta 2 is absolutely fabulous! No more hitting CTRL+SPACE to get the code completion to work. No more hassling with IIS when developing ASP.NET sites (VS2005 has built-in development server). Server Explorer is excellent (I think VS2003 had it also, now it has been improved). And heck! I even like generics even though I used to hate templates in C++ :)

It's good to be VSIP.

Re:Crappy IDE

[ReluctantRefactorer]

Thanks, If I were doing .NET dev, I'd certainly give that a look. At the moment though I'm doing "old school" C++/MFC/ATL development.

VS.NET 2005

[trezor]

I haven't been able to sample VS.NET 2005 too thourougly, but as far as developing ASP.NET applications goes, the changes are tremendous.

And for the better, I might add, in case there were any doubt.

Re:Crappy IDE

[aztracker1]

gotcha, most vb and c++ guys I know are sticking with VS6, sorry for the assumption there.. :)

In gold, ey?

[trezor]

So how much does a 4GB installation of Visual Studio weigh, if I may ask? :P

Just kidding. I couldn't agree more.

Excuse me my presumptiousness...

[trezor]

But I would think that the reason for these "bugs" happen to be the VB.NET programmer himself. *grin*

But really. Why, oh, why not use the C# instead?

Re:Excuse me my presumptiousness...

[anomalous cohort]

why not use C# instead?

Good question. At the time that this project started, the company had only VB programmers. It was felt at that time that the transition between VB to VB.NET would be easier for the group than the transition between VB to C#.

This was a mistake. .NET is so fundamentally different from COM that the big transition is from any COM based language to any .NET based language. In light of the full realization of just how long it takes for the so-called background compile to pick its way through a huge solution, I wished that we had gone with C# instead. C# projects do not have a background compile.

Re:The basic flaw in this logic

[Procyon101]

On your first point. The Windows VM is in no way horribly slow, in fact it's a very elegant VM, comparable to Java, although not as mature. VM's however, are bloated by definition compared to native code. Show me a substancially better VM out there than .NET. Java is good, and mature, but inferior in concept... and available on windows from the same primary vendor I might add which is not an advantage for Linux. The NT SMP has always been the best in the business, orders of magnitude faster than Linux until the 2.4 kernels. SMP reperation was the big push for 2.4 precicely because of how much NT kicked it's ass. The NTFS File system has no peer in security; it's the best, hands down, and not too shabby on speed either. I have no idea why you picked NT's strongest points as examples here. You could have chosen examples like GNU/Linux being leaps and bounds ahead in cluster support, standardization of code, small footprint, intelligent RAM allocation and file caching, HID responsiveness, a sane file locking strategy, better all around browsers, better interoperability, etc... but Net Stack, VM, SMP and File System are things that NT did right. Where Windows truely excels, however is the proliferation of highly polished workstation applications, ease of configuration and live updating. And games, but that's just the popularity of the platform speaking. there are many examples of linux security holes. Try being on the gentoo mailing list for a bit, you'll see how secure this "bullet proof" OS is. Security is an issue for everyone right now and open source is just as vulnerable. Windows gets targeted more than Linux because it controls much more of the machines out there making for a target rich environment. Recent reports have not shown OSS to be substantially more secure. You can however make an arguement that at least with OSS you have the chance to close the holes yourself or do your own code audits, which IMO is a very nice bonus. And as for your last point, my arguement was not in speed of development. Both OS's have been progressing rapidly. I simply said that just because MS approximates release dates and misses them does not, by itself, show development to be slower on Windows. Linux does not set dates at all, so it is an unfair comparison. And before you peg me for a windows enthusiast, I'm typing this on Firefox, from my gentoo workstation, mantained via CFEngine on my primary server, alongside my performance cluster of gentoo boxes, behind my Linux firewall. I've got 2 machines here (out of 18) that run Windows. 1 is a test machine I use to verify my products still work under Windows, and my girlfriend's laptop. I much prefer Linux, as it is a much more sane development environment and is perfect for all my clustering needs, and I happen to think it's the best OS out there for my uses. That doesn't mean that Windows isn't ahead in a few areas.

Re:The one VS.Net 2003 plug-in I cannot live witho

[The Grassy Knoll]

Agreed, it's great.

But if you're working on more than one project at a time, the "load time" is very annoying. (It seems to build a big cache of methods, etc., when it loads)

> Version 2.0 (due out late this year) will also support 2005, Visual Basic, and ASP.Net coding

What do you mean by "will support ASP.NET"? That's what I use it for already.

.

The Borland world

[TheArns]

Even if Kylix has not been updated for long, Delphi/Kylix is still the best IDE you can find.

In case you are member of the .NET brotherhood, the last version (Delphi architect 2005) also includes .NET

Arns.

Just use subversion!

[gyg]

Why use VSS at all? Use Subversion, AnkhSVN takes care of VS.NET integration, and TortoiseSVN integrates it with the file browser (Windows Explorer).

Re:Your number one IDE

[orion41us]

And what do you want from code in 4 years? Lifespan of most programms is much less (2 years IMHO)....

Anyone know of a VS.NET plugin that

[The MESMERIC]

Allows me to add pictures into my C# code?
SVG would be great, but any would do even BMP/GIF/JPEG/PNG.

Visual commenting (even mind maps) are so much better (for me at least).

I've been looking for such a plugin/code editor for aeons.

Re:mandatory

[vhogemann]

A best question would be... Can it compile Linux?

file explorer

[kcornwell]

I want a simple File Explorer built into the IDE like Dreamweaver or most every other IDE. Is there a add-on?

Re:file explorer

[zero-one]

I don't know what the Dreamweaver file explorer does but I have written a file winder add-in for Visual Studio (hack #18) that might do what you want, see my web page.

Re:file explorer

[zero-one]

s/winder/finder/

Re:file explorer

[kcornwell]

More like this... http://www.kevincornwell.com/_misc/screen.JPG

Re:I HATE VISUAL STUDIO.NET !!!

[DevSlick]

This seems to be a common issue. But, since most of us Americans only know a single language, we really shouldn't pick on him too much.

Re:The one VS.Net 2003 plug-in I cannot live witho

[SpryGuy]

It will support code-behind pages in ways it does not currently. ASP.Net support will be expanded.

Also, that modal start-up dialog will be changed so that modules and caches load in the background. Hopefully that'll help your start-up complaint (though some features won't be available until all the caches finish loading).

There's also a great new "File Structure" window that allows you to drag and drop methods around, see/collapse/expand regions, etc.

Re:Your number one IDE

[bored]

.NET assholes. I've been running the 64-bit version of windows for a year (2?) or so now. I got it basically the day the early beta came out. Back then the only way to build 64-bit applications for windows was to run 6 and use the DDK compiler with it.

I never really liked the .net versions anyway, so I'm still running 6 with the newer compilers underneth. It feels a lot faster and the keymappings work the way my fingers expect them to. I tried 2005 for a while but couldn't figure out how to get it to behave like 6. A lot of it has to do with the fact that I run the with the screen nearly full of source files, and use the alt-number shortcuts to pop up the errors, and project management windows. This doesn't work in 2005 which is really anoying.

VS2005 Beta From MS for $12, No MSDN

[BuildMonkey]

I went to this link http://msdn.microsoft.com/getthebetas/ and gave MS $12 and they shipped me two copies of VS2005 Beta 2. They arrived in two days.

This is the real thing, with the optimizing compiler and the IDE. The Express editions lack the OS header files (windows.h, etc). This means you cannot access network, file systems, etc. I'm pretty sure that the Express editions also lack the very good optimizing compiler, but its been a while since I used Express.

Vim Intellisense

[StarFire_FIN]

You can get an Intellisense plugin for vim too, check it out at http://insenvim.sourceforge.net/

Re:Change of times??

[was_ms_now_linux]

I SlashDot funded by MS now? I've always heard this, but discounted it as rumor. But, with all the MS advertising, it must be dependent on some MS $$$ - either directly or indirectly. Doug Hettinger www.SoftwareObjectz.com

Re:The one VS.Net 2003 plug-in I cannot live witho

[The Grassy Knoll]

Nice one, I look forward to the new features!

At the moment, I particularly like the automation of repetitive tasks, e.g. "Need a public read/write attibute for you protected one? Just use this quick key combination!"

.

Other Visual .NET recommendations?

[Macklyn]

I'm looking for a Visual Studio .NET & C# tutorial, one that takes me by the hand and leads me around like I'm a clueless idjit. I'm a former C programmer who purchased Visual Studio .NET 2003 and am baffled by all the options choices. Recommendations anyone? Thanks, Mack - who must become more technical or they'll make a manager out of me...

Re:One more...

[Listen Up]

Are you using OS X on a fully supported machine and peripherals with a properly installed copy of OS X? It doesn't sound like it at all.

I develop full-time on both Windows XP and OS X (10.4.2). I have had to reboot Windows XP fairly rarely due to crashes of some sort, but I have to reboot Windows XP fairly often due to gradual system degradation. OS X, on the other hand, I have never yet had to reboot due to a hard lock up and have only had to reboot otherwise because I turn off the computer for the weekends when I am not at work.

I would personally disregard your post in light of other people's experience's with OS X, including my own. Your experiences are not the majority and definitely sound like they are to do with other factors involved with your installation and use of OS X.