Slashdot Mirror
Inside Visual Studio 2008
mlimber writes "Dr Dobb's Journal has a peek at what is new in Microsoft's Visual Studio 2008. Most of the features discussed in the article are related to .NET, web development, and the IDE itself. However, Herb Sutter, Microsoft software architect and chair of the ISO C++ Standards committee, blogged about some developments on the C++ front. This includes a significantly enhanced MFC for GUI building, and the inclusion of TR1 (library extensions published by the C++ standards committee, most of which have also been incorporated into the next C++ standard)."
All I could say is that the best tool for windows development just got better. The new feature that could impact my work most is LINQ. I dunno but the VS Team of M$ had been doing some good things...
Do they actually have C99 support yet?
Back in 1998 I would have welcomed a standard compliant C++ compiler from Microsoft. What Microsoft did support, it supported one level deep (e.g. namespaces, many template features) with unbridled hypocrisy.
Fast forward to 2008, if Microsoft can't be bothered, others can, so now they bother. Kind of like arriving at a New Year's party at half past twelve. The champagne is gone, and when you make your grand entrance into the room full of glassy expressions, everyone slaps you on the back and says "hey, glad you could make it". Almost like being there.
Seriously though, what's so difficult about the memory management model of C? I find it hard to think of anything much simpler. The great thing about C (IMHO) is that if you didn't write it, it won't happen.
I still develop in Visual Studio 6. Yes, the language support is somewhat lacking (scope rules for 'for' get me regularly), but to me it just feels so much nicer to work in than the later versions of VS. As if this was the last version that was still for C++ developers: I neither want nor need to develop web pages, C# applications, .NET stuff, or whatever crap they added later, and I sure don't want it to be the focus of the package I'm working in, with C++ thrown in as an afterthought.
Have they brought back the keyboard macro's? They were there in VS6 but I could never find them in later versions.
As long as I've known that MS makes an IDE, I've always wondered why they charge for (some versions) of it. The majority of apps compiled on it get compiled to MS Windows binaries. People will need to buy Windows to use these apps. That means more money for MS as more people make useful/necessary apps. Where does MS benefit by charging for the development tools? It seems to me that there would be much bigger benefit to giving away the tools for free. Perhaps I'm greatly underestimating the chunk of change MS makes by selling their development tools. Is that it? Otherwise, please explain it to me.
What do they mean?
Do they mean, perhaps, that widgets are now normal objects? no double-creation (first new Object, then object->CreateWindow).
Could they mean that all widgets are destroyed in the same way? no object->DestroyWindow for some widgets, delete object for some other widgets?
How about some serious memory management using shared pointers? no temp CBrush objects etc.
How about layout management? all serious widget toolkits have that. It's 2008, we should not have to position widgets manually.
What about the tab widget? in MFC, the tab widget is not a real widget: you have to manually hide and show controls upon tab click.
What about the model-view-controller pattern? this is 2008, should I still manually copy edited data from widgets to the data model of my application? most other toolkits support the MVC pattern. Dialog Data eXchange is a joke, of course.
How about the issue of message maps? Qt proves you don't need stinkin' message maps, which are hard to maintain, difficult to understand, and dangerous because casting is untyped and done through macros.
How about MIME type support?
These, and a lot more, are the issues that have driven developers away from MFC to Qt or WxWidgets. I have been maintaining a line of products based on MFC for the last 10 years, but this year I've decided I had enough: all the products are to be rewritten with Qt/WxWidgets. I will only approach MFC if it will approach Qt/WxWidgets quality.
Why, righ here, of course.