First Look At Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1

snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Martin Heller takes VS2010 Beta 1 for a test drive and finds the upgrade promising, particularly with regard to improved thread debugging and a revamped UI. But the biggest enhancements have to do with parallel programming, Heller writes. 'I'm not sure that I've completely grasped the power of the new .Net Framework and native C++ support for task and data parallelism in VS2010, but what I've seen so far is impressive.' Heller points to intriguing parallel programming samples posted to CodePlex and offers numerous screenshots of VS2010 Beta 1 functionality. He also notes that the beta still lacks support for ASP.Net MVC, smart devices, and the .Net Micro Framework."

Comments

Yay!

[Anonymous Coward]

Visual Studio is the best!

Seriously.

Re:Yay!

[sys.stdout.write]

I love how you have to post anonymously in order to support Microsoft products on Slashdot.

Screw it, I second this. Visual Studio has the best code completion implementation ever written. I can type lines like obj.GetSomething().Append(item) in about four keystrokes.

This makes me warm and fuzzy inside.

Re:Yay!

[gbjbaanb]

obj.GetSomething().Append(item) in about four keystrokes.

I believe that should be:

System.Csharp.Adding.Namespace.Collections.Stuff.Object.Manipulation obj;
obj.GetSomething().Append(item);

You *need* an IDE that allows code completion, or no-one be able to write more than 7 lines of code a day.

Re:Yay!

[internerdj]

I don't know I do pretty well sometimes with ctrl-c and ctrl-v and a couple of other keystrokes.

Re:Yay!

[Dutch Gun]

If someone hasn't gotten the hang of the 'using' keyword, then they probably shouldn't be writing more than 7 lines of code a day.

Re:Yay!

[dave562]

I'm still writing my code using Notepad you insensitive clod!

Re:Yay!

[doti]

No, what you need is a sane programming language/technique.

Re:Yay!

[Jugalator]

And it's FAR more accurate in Visual C++ 2010 too.

This was earlier a problem with code complexity and the peculiarities of the C++ language, but the system has been rewritten and I believe is now based on what the compiler itself will have as its "impression" of the code.

Re:Yay!

[Xest]

Apparently you need to go and read a book on namespaces.

You can use namespaces that horribly badly in other languages too including Java and C++ if you really want to, but any professional programmer should be at a level where they're not that bad at it.

Re:Yay!

[Rasperin]

That's what she said

Re:Yay!

[bertok]

Screw it, I second this. Visual Studio has the best code completion implementation ever written. I can type lines like obj.GetSomething().Append(item) in about four keystrokes.

Have you tried IntelliJ IDEA? It's Java-only, but I found its code completion to be many, MANY times better than VS. For one, instead of showing you every symbol that matches a prefix, it narrows down to the appropriate type.

For example, in VS, if you create two methods with similar names ("int Test1()", "string Test2()"), and try and tab complete something like string "foo = T", it'll show you Test1() first, even though Test2() is a far better match.

Note that I use VS 2008 daily, and I've got 2010 installed as well. I just tested that in VS 2010, and it still shows you every single identifier available, including class names. I know that technically, the intention may have been to reference a static, but in practice, they could go to some lengths to select a "most likely" set and an "alphabetical" set, and show the most likely first, and only show the complete set if you try to complete twice, or something.

It's a great IDE, but it could be a lot better. Microsoft really needs to get over their "not invented here" attitude, install a competing IDE at least ONCE, try it, and learn that other people sometimes do things better.

Re:Yay!

[Chabo]

Not only that, in his example, you'd probably be able to type "Manipulation obj;" on the first line, and Visual Studio will ask you if you want to add a "using System.Csharp.Adding.Namespace.Collections.Stuff.Object" line up top, or if you want to prepend "System.Csharp.Adding.Namespace.Collections.Stuff.Object." to "Manipulation".

Re:Yay!

[Anonymous Coward]

Fuck off win-fag.

Re:Yay!

[Sam36]

Freaking idiot, learn how to program: http://74.125.47.132/search?q=cache:Y2-L8aE3zxQJ:jmcpherson.org/editing.html+vim+keyword+completion&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us

If you were my employee I would fire you.

Re:Yay!

[quercus.aeternam]

May I interest you in a truly advanced OS/Environment/Editor?

Or do you lack the skills necessary to make the machine obey your every whim?

oblig: http://xkcd.com/378/

Re:Yay!

[Anonymous Coward]

2008 does that for me already for C#. Also, I use Visual Assist X, so it might be the one doing it.

Re:Yay!

[shutdown -p now]

I would concur that when it comes to code completion and refactoring, IntelliJ IDEA still beats everyone, and NetBeans and Eclipse generally beat VS when you compare apples to apples (i.e. Java to C#). You can get to roughly the same level if you add ReSharper (which isn't exactly surprising, as it's made by the same guys who make IDEA), but that's extra $$$ ...

On the other hand, Visual C++ still has the most reliable C++ code completion of all IDEs that I've seen, and it's got even better in VS2010.

Re:Yay!

[Anonymous Coward]

Hisssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss

It is the microsoft. kill it with fire.

Re:Yay!

[Anonymous Coward]

I do even better with keystrokes like 'yy' and 'cw'

Re:Yay!

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

Visual SlickEdit does a much better job of completion than Visual Studio, for precisely that reason - it wil llist variables of appropriate type, in order of local, member, global.

Re:Yay!

[bertok]

I tried Resharper, but I think the VS add-in model wasn't really flexible enough to support the level of integration the IntelliJ guys were trying to achieve, so it was always flaky for me. It kept misbehaving, the graphics was sometimes glitchy, etc...

I doubt it's IntelliJ's fault, all of their products are top-notch.

I hope VS 2010 either improves massively in subsequent betas, or that it'll be flexible enough for a third-party plugin to fix all the gaps.

Re:Yay!

[shutdown -p now]

I hope VS 2010 either improves massively in subsequent betas, or that it'll be flexible enough for a third-party plugin to fix all the gaps.

The editor in VS2010 is brand new, and it has a much more sane and powerful extensibility model. I do not know enough about the details, so I couldn't say if it's good enough to "smooth out" Resharper, but there's definite hope.

Re:Yay!

[mario_grgic]

Could you also tell us how many other IDEs are you proficient with. Otherwise your statement doesn't mean much.

I often hear things like that from people who only ever used VS, and who would not be able to write the code without it to begin with. If you gave them plain text editor and asked them to write code to do something simple they would start crying, or leave immediately if you did that in an interview.

Re:Yay!

[kitezh]

To be honest, I prefer the way Netbeans does code completion over Visual Studio. Yes, sometimes you want it to remember the last variable/function you used starting with that letter, but when you have different variables starting with the same characters and you are going through each of them, it becomes a pain. I never could find a way to change it so that it completes what it can, up until the point that the different variations change spelling, then let me type the first letter of the variation I want, then continue completing the word from there.

Re:Yay!

[liamoshan]

Microsoft really needs to get over their "not invented here" attitude, install a competing IDE at least ONCE, try it, and learn that other people sometimes do things better.

They probably assume that like VisualStudio, competing IDE's take over an hour to install and just can't be bothered

VS is a great product, but god damn does it (and the complementary MSDN library) take a long time to install

Re:Yay!

[adonoman]

No, that's just vanilla VS2008 for C#.

Re:Yay!

[gparent]

He already has a sane programming language. It's called C#. What he needs is to wake the hell up and figure out what the "using" keyword is for and how Visual Studio will automatically offer you to add it at the top of your files when needed.

Re:Yay!

[bobintetley]

On the other hand, Visual C++ still has the most reliable C++ code completion of all IDEs that I've seen, and it's got even better in VS2010.

I don't know what you're doing with it then, but as someone paid to write C++ all day every day with VS2008, I can hand on heart say that the C++ code completion in VS2008 is fucking awful. It kills my dual core CPU updating the intellisense database frequently (ok, I'm working on a large project made up of about 140 modules), then fails to find globals and class members quite often in the same file.

Most times it's only about as useful as grep, but even then manages to be worse since it gives no priority to context - if I have two global variables in two different modules with the same name and ask for the definition in one module, it will quite often open a source file in the other module.

When testing alternatives, I found eclipse-cpp and netbeans-cpp to be far superior at C++ code completion. Unfortunately, I work for an American corporate who "standardise" on Microsoft products :-(

Re:Yay!

[Anonymous Coward]

Touché!

Re:Yay!

[Matje]

try Resharper. It'll fix that code completion for you, and do tons of more useful stuff.

Re:Yay!

[Anonymous Coward]

Well I only use it as a debugger occasionally. It is much better to just edit the makefile.vc generated by bakefile. Just edit a few compiler switches and that's it. Go ahead, click on "Project->Property Pages->Configurations->C++", going through 20 freaking dialogs reading tiny little fonts just to set a few switches is real FUN!

I dont give a crap about completion especially it leaves a 50MEG ncb file forcing me to delete it every time I backup the entire directory. Besides, any editor that requires you to use the CURSOR KEYS is designed by retard. VS doesn't support key bindings, right? +1 point for Eclipse and NetBeans.

What's wrong with "nmake -f makefiel.vc"? Nothing!
Msbuild is such a piece of crap that no one use.

Re:Yay!

[Anonymous Coward]

When you are creating a procedure and thinking about what it does, do you want to be reminded that the line you just typed is incorrect? What is more important is whether the line should be there in the first place, and intellisense will never tell you that.

Re:Yay!

[RCL]

On the other hand, Visual C++ still has the most reliable C++ code completion of all IDEs that I've seen, and it's got even better in VS2010.

How come? Intellisense does not like macros (e.g. it has troubles finding functions that are declared inside macros), it often fails for me on not-that-large code base (about 750k LOC in about 10 thousand files) even for simple functions. It does not like forward declarations as well, leaving me without hint if some class was only defined, but not #include'd. If Visual Studio were that superb, there would be no market for tools like VisualAssist (try it, it fixes a lot of Intellisense flaws).

Re:Yay!

[Anonymous Coward]

Try Resharper. It's a visual studio plugin that improves code completion, among other useful functions.

Re:Yay!

[Anonymous Coward]

I love how you have to post anonymously in order to support Microsoft products on Slashdot.

Screw it, I second this. Visual Studio has the best code completion implementation ever written. I can type lines like obj.GetSomething().Append(item) in about four keystrokes.

This makes me warm and fuzzy inside.

Yeah it is brillant, and allows me to write code very quickly.

The greatest thing for me in the 2010 Beta is the Intellisense for Database Projects! This is going to making my sql queries much quicker to write.

Re:Yay!

[gbjbaanb]

you van do that in VB.NET, if you have using System.Csharp.Adding at the top, you can ignore that bit, and just type "Namespace.Collections.Stuff.Object obj" and it'll figure it out. (if it can't, it underlines in red, and you have to start adding more of the namespaces until it can be explicitly resolved).

C# is an all-or-nothing approach, either put the whole lot in the using; or the whole lot in the code line. Maybe VS2010 has this fixed.

Its strange that C# gets all the fanbois, yet VB is a better language. I always wondered what would have happened if MS produced VB.NET and Pascal.NET instead of curly-bracketed C#.

I still don't like the sheer quantity of namespaces there are. Its like a junior programmer suddenly finding that namespaces can be used... and does so everywhere.

Re:Yay!

[gbjbaanb]

Unfortunately, I work for an American corporate who "standardise" on Microsoft products :-(

So do I. Expect to be converting all your code to C#/WPF any day soon :(

Re:Yay!

[bemymonkey]

I don't know about it being the best, but from my limited experience (then again, I'm still using VS2005 - dunno about newer versions) it's got everything I need.

On an unrelated note - anyone else's Slashdot views going all wonky? Mine looks like this:

http://i302.photobucket.com/albums/nn108/bemymonkey/slashdot.gif

Re:Yay!

[mdwh2]

Actually, as much as I do love Visual Studio and agree that it is the best IDE around overall now - I do find that "Intellisense" autocompletion is often rather buggy, often being annoyingly unavailable (yes, even when the code is valid), and I can never fathom out the logic. I once recently got into a state where it wouldn't work at all for a project, until I deleted the ".ncb" file.

For comparison, the autocompletion on my old Borland C++ Builder Pro 4 worked fine always.

Re:Yay!

[Anonymous Coward]

I have to disagree with you. I much prefer Microsoft's implementation. It may show me all results, but the highlighted item is almost 90% of the time, what I want. And if it isn't, it's one, maybe two keystrokes away.

Perhaps it comes down to personal preference, I don't know. But going from something like Netbeans or Eclipse to Visual Studio, is like dropping an axe and using a bloody laser pistol to cut trees. Not only is it more precise, but it allows me to do more in the same time.

 

I know that technically, the intention may have been to reference a static, but in practice, they could go to some lengths to select a "most likely" set and an "alphabetical" set, and show the most likely first, and only show the complete set if you try to complete twice, or something.

They already do choose a "most likely". I swear, when I use it, I feel like my mind is being read. And as the poster higher up said, some long hierarchies are navigated using one-two keystrokes, a few spaces and finally an enter.

Re:Yay!

[mdwh2]

Whether or not that's a valid argument, that's an issue with .NET. You don't have to use .NET with Visual Studio...

Re:Yay!

[bh213]

Try resharper. Written by IntelliJ, has same shortcuts as IDEA, supports every C# feature. It is not free, but IMO well worth the money.

Re:Yay!

[koreaman]

Same problem here. (IE8 32-bit on Windows Vista 64-bit)

Re:Yay!

[shutdown -p now]

If Visual Studio were that superb, there would be no market for tools like VisualAssist (try it, it fixes a lot of Intellisense flaws).

I didn't say VS is perfect - I merely said it does better than all other C++ IDEs I've tried (which are Eclipse CDT, NetBeans, KDevelop3, and Qt Creator).

And, yes, Visual Assist definitely adds a lot to VS2008 and below. We'll see about VS2010.

Re:Yay!

[gonz]

How can you compare Java code-completion to C++ code-completion? Java has a relatively simple grammar with no macros. C++ is a very complex language that mixes together #include's, inline assembly, old-school C syntax, compile-time execution via templates, .NET extensions, auto-generated ATL/COM wrappers, etc.

-Gonz

Re:Yay!

[Anonymous Coward]

Note that I use VS 2008 daily, and I've got 2010 installed as well. I just tested that in VS 2010, and it still shows you every single identifier available, including class names.

I call bullshit. VS2010 beahves in the exact way you just described.

Re:oh

[Anonymous Coward]

The same thing all MS software does of course...

Re:oh

[whitefang1121]

So then nothing!

Re:oh

[VeNoM0619]

So what does it do then, exactly??

But the biggest enhancements have to do with parallel programming,

It means: developers, developers, developers, developers.

Re:oh

[Anpheus]

No, like this:

developers
developers
developers
developers
deverlopee
elsdeverlpr
opesdeveos

Or something like that. Threading is hard! :)

More security?

[johannesg]

Look at that fourth screenshot. What possible harm could loading a project do, I wonder? Does it already (partially?) execute even when it is just sitting there in the development environment? Is this an attempt to banish evil compilers from accidentally compiling source?

And why is the answer always "make the user choose" even though there is absolutely no way to make an informed choice (same problem as with UAC or sudo: I don't want to hand over the keys to the kingdom, I only want to give out narrow and specific permissions, based on useful information, rather than some nebulous feeling of 'trust')?

Re:More security?

[KingPin27]

Look at that fourth screenshot. What possible harm could loading a project do, I wonder? Does it already (partially?) execute even when it is just sitting there in the development environment? Is this an attempt to banish evil compilers from accidentally compiling source?

And why is the answer always "make the user choose" even though there is absolutely no way to make an informed choice (same problem as with UAC or sudo: I don't want to hand over the keys to the kingdom, I only want to give out narrow and specific permissions, based on useful information, rather than some nebulous feeling of 'trust')?

Could it be some sort of pre-compile - that way your project looks like it compiles fast when in reality its being compiled at code time?

Re:More security?

[rob1980]

Does it already (partially?) execute even when it is just sitting there in the development environment?

Visual Studio picks through whatever classes you write and adds support for them to Intellisense. Maybe they've observed security issues with that in the past?

Re:More security?

[Anonymous Coward]

The visual designer actually instantiates the backing class and executes its constructor when opened for editing, to be able to render the component in a wysiwyg fashion.

Re:More security?

[Mr2001]

Look at that fourth screenshot. What possible harm could loading a project do, I wonder? Does it already (partially?) execute even when it is just sitting there in the development environment? Is this an attempt to banish evil compilers from accidentally compiling source?

As it says right there in the screenshot, the possible harm is from custom build steps.

Unix developers are already used to this, because makefiles have the same risks: if you untar an untrusted project and type "make", you might find that one of the build steps erases your home directory.

Re:More security?

[wzinc]

Does it already (partially?) execute even when it is just sitting there in the development environment

Actually, it kind-of does execute. Most controls, even user-created ones, have "design mode." That's a special view that gets rendered while you're designing pages or forms. I never thought about it, but it is just code that executes. I don't know if there's anything that prevents you from opening up an FTP connection or calling "del /f /s /q C:\*" from a control in design mode.

Re:More security?

[TheThiefMaster]

If the projects have custom build steps set up they can execute any program they like before / after / to compile.

That's all it's warning about.

Re:More security?

[shutdown -p now]

As it says right there in the screenshot, the possible harm is from custom build steps.

To clarify (since it may not be obvious to those who haven't used VS, and, in fact, even to many who did) - Visual Studio projects are nothing more but MSBuild makefiles, which has roughly the same expressive power and extensibility as, say, Apache Ant. In particular, the build steps can include file system operations, and execution of arbitrary shell commands. By default, VS-created projects have nothing like this, and so the verifier lets them load without asking. But if the file was hand-edited to include any such things, you'll see the dialog such as one on the screenshot.

Re:More security?

[sys.stdout.write]

Why is this modded funny? This is exactly what it does.

This is by far the best approach. Say I create a custom window which paints itself in some strange way. In the Visual Studio designer I can actually move it around in the dialog box and it will paint itself correctly.

Re:More security?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know if there's anything that prevents you from opening up an FTP connection or calling "del /f /s /q C:\*" from a control in design mode.

There isn't, but it doesn't make any difference. As soon as you debug your program the controls are running in "real" mode, and can do equally evil things. Or do you hand your code over to the testers as soon as it compiles?

Re:More security?

[Anonymous Coward]

Visual Studio would not allow such a thing. For an example, see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms171823.aspx

Re:More security?

[K. S. Kyosuke]

So it finally works as well as Delphi did ten years ago? *hides*

Re:More security?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey you idiot, this is for the source control, if you loaded the project normally it will connect to source control to get the status of each file, if you choose to load the project for readonly you will just be able to read code and not change it whatsoever

Re:oh

[DragonWriter]

He also notes that the beta still lacks support for ASP.Net MVC, smart devices, and the .Net Micro Framework.

So what does it do then, exactly??

Traditional non-web programming for the desktop/laptop (that is, not a resource-constrained mobile device or embedded system) environment?

Anyone even using VS 2008 yet?

[tylersoze]

Heck no one I've worked with has even upgraded to 2008 yet, it's been either VS 2005 or 2003.

Re:Anyone even using VS 2008 yet?

[snl2587]

I'm using 2008. Do I get a cookie?

Re:Anyone even using VS 2008 yet?

[rob1980]

Me too. Chocolate chip plz!

Re:Anyone even using VS 2008 yet?

[sys.stdout.write]

We run it at work. It is pretty much the same as VS 2005. The only relevant advantage that I see is access to the .NET 3.5 Framework, which may or may not matter to you depending on what you guys program.

Re:Anyone even using VS 2008 yet?

[sys.stdout.write]

What am I saying? Of course it matters to you - you get a free Firefox extension with it!

Re:Anyone even using VS 2008 yet?

[zlogic]

Visual C++ hasn't changed much since VS 2002. In fact it looks abandoned compared to .NET languages, it has worse Intellisense, debugging and code formatting. And no refactoring or decent GUI toolkit. Both MFC and Win32 API are incredibly difficult to code.

2008 has a lot of nice features, but only for .NET.

Re:Anyone even using VS 2008 yet?

[Anonymous Coward]

do you even use vc? VC has had great improvement in term of standard compliance over the years, both in compiler and libary. In that front, it is close to GCC. In 2008 and 2008 sp1 it even included a lot of TR1 features and enhanced MFC with ribbon support.

When will people learn listening, instead of talking about things they don't know.

Re:Anyone even using VS 2008 yet?

[shutdown -p now]

We run it at work. It is pretty much the same as VS 2005.

If you use it for C++ development, then the C++ compiler in 2008 has better standard compliance, and some nasty bugs in the libraries are fixed. Also, VS2008 SP1 adds C++ TR1 stuff.

Re:Anyone even using VS 2008 yet?

[Amazing Quantum Man]

No, but you do get an add-in for FireFox... no questions asked!

Re:Anyone even using VS 2008 yet?

[Acer500]

I am, and I'm extremely happy with it (of course I migrated from VB 6, so anything would look good).

I'm probably at the "feature abuse" level, but I'm in love with LINQ, the amount of help you get from the IDE for everything is great, and it saves time like nobody's business.

I've used Eclipse for university projects until I graduated a couple years ago, and while it was good, VS 2008 blows it away (to be fair I should compare the current version of Eclipse though).

On to the dark side of the framework, the Entity Framework is AWFUL at this stage... I guess that it will become useable by version 3.0. We'll be looking into NHibernate and other options soon. And Microsoft is still behind on a lot of AJAXy stuff, the Web side is still in need of more polish - some stuff, like the AJAX panels, is bloated, and it's far easier to do a trillion postbacks than to work with Javascript with the IDE.

I'm really looking forward to VS 2010 due to its improved Javascript support, so it might address some of the current limitations.

Re:Anyone even using VS 2008 yet?

[AndrewNeo]

Pshaw, you know your name should be System.Console.Write!

Re:Anyone even using VS 2008 yet?

[Anonymous Coward]

The .NET 3.5 framework is completely accessible with VS 2005. Just add a reference to System.Core to your project. What you're mainly missing by not upgrading to 2008 are compiler features like LINQ (Or rather, the syntactic-sugary syntax for it. Everything that the sugary version gets transformed into is in the framework.) and lambda expressions.

Re:Anyone even using VS 2008 yet?

[shutdown -p now]

Visual C++ hasn't changed much since VS 2002.

Eh? It's got C++/CLI since then, for starters. It has become much closer to ISO C++ (before 2003 it was a total joke, it didn't even get the scope of the for loop right - and 2003 was only so-so). It's got checked STL containers & iterators in 2005, and C++TR1 in 2008. And it is getting significantly improved code completion, and on-the-fly error checking in 2010. Doesn't sound "abandoned" to me.

On the language front, Visual C++ in 2010 gets a bunch of C++0x features: lambdas, type inference (auto), static_assert , rvalue references (&&), and decltype. This is quite a lot, and lambdas are especially nice since they actually let you use STL algorithms as God intended without writing tons of boilerplate code for function objects.

Then also there's Parallel Patterns Library, which provides STL-like algorithms with automatic parallelization.

And no refactoring

This one is interesting. I do not know of any C++ IDE or plugin that would provide working C++ refactoring, for very simple reason - it is extremely hard to properly parse C++, taking into account all templates and template specializations, and other context-dependent things. Heck, something like a<b>c can be parsed either as expression (a < b) > c, or as a variable declaration a<b> c, depending on the context - and that context, again, includes template instantiations, which form a Turing-complete language that has to be interpreted correctly to produce matching results. I once wrote a C++ program, for fun, which had in it a piece of code as described above, which was parsed and compiled either as expression or as variable declaration depending on whether char type was signed or unsigned was for a given compiler - so you could play with compiler options and get different results. How can IDE possibly handle this?

You can say that it does it for code completion, but the truth is that a lot of it is guessing and heuristics. And there's the catch - when it guesses wrong, at worst, you get a wrong code completion list, or no list at all. But when you do a refactoring like, say, "rename class", and it fails to correctly determine that the class is referenced at some line of code, and doesn't rename it there, then your program no longer compiles...

That said, VS2010 IDE C++ parser (used for code completion and "Go to definition") is EDG-based, so it should be much more accurate - so hopefully we'll get reliable C++ refactoring eventually. Just not in this release.

... decent GUI toolkit. Both MFC and Win32 API are incredibly difficult to code.

I agree with that, but there are many good third-party libraries out there - most notably, Qt.

Re:Anyone even using VS 2008 yet?

[Anonymous Coward]

I have upgraded to VS 2008 (It required much teeth pulling and a 'conference' with 'The Architect' out back with a baseball bat). The best things available out of the box with VS 2008 are these: Target multiple versions of .NET Framework (2008 can work with .NET 2.0, 3.0 and 3.5, no more direct correlation between .NET and VS versions), WCF and LINQ. The interface seems to be a bit more stable too, but I digress...

Re:Anyone even using VS 2008 yet?

[Xest]

Yes, it has much better intellisense which is the most glaring feature because it's the one that you encounter every second whilst programming.

Makes writing code a breeze, as a fairly fast touch typist, not having to type the full variable never ever because the intellisense is generally good enough to get the right variable/function name the first time (due to the fact it narrows down not just by name, but by context) I can churn out code like no tommorrow. You can put together a full, fairly complex line of code with only a few keypresses.

Re:Anyone even using VS 2008 yet?

[hviniciusg]

Yes i do, and i'm loving it.

specially Linq.

Re:Anyone even using VS 2008 yet?

[TheRealMindChild]

How about being able to target .NET 1.1, 2.0, 3.0, or 3.5? I thought that was pretty significant. Before, if you wanted to target .NET 1.1, you had to use VS 2003. If you wanted to target 2.0, you had to use 2005. With 2008, you can target any of them.

Re:Anyone even using VS 2008 yet?

[sys.stdout.write]

Touche :-)

That being said, some of us aren't lucky enough to choose the language we program in at work. I assure you I'd be using Python over .NET if I had the choice.

Re:Anyone even using VS 2008 yet?

[zlogic]

Eclipse does C++ refactoring, I think Netbeans can do it too. I've used Eclipse for renaming values, implementing methods and generating getters/setters, it didn't ever break anything and showed all code that was about to be changed before doing something irreversible. Even if it breaks something, there's Local History which acts as a simple version control server, committing code on every save operation.
If a compiler can parse the code, the IDE should be capable of doing that.

Re:Anyone even using VS 2008 yet?

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny, because I don't know anyone who hasn't upgraded yet.

Re:Anyone even using VS 2008 yet?

[Anonymous Coward]

There are a few C++ refactoring add-ins for Visual Studio
Refactor! for C++
Visual Assist X

C++ can be very hard to parse but most of the time the refactoring tools work.

Re:Anyone even using VS 2008 yet?

[shutdown -p now]

Eclipse does C++ refactoring, I think Netbeans can do it too. I've used Eclipse for renaming values, implementing methods and generating getters/setters, it didn't ever break anything

Did you use it with more-or-less advanced templates (e.g. anything that actively uses STL or Boost)?

If a compiler can parse the code, the IDE should be capable of doing that.

A compiler parses the code once. It doesn't have to reparse the code constantly as you keep typing or deleting lines, and to do it fast enough that the updates are near-realtime, and yet the user doesn't complain about the sluggishness.

Re:Anyone even using VS 2008 yet?

[AceMarkE]

Actually, I think the Eclipse CDT plugin provides some amount of C++ refactoring. I know it can at least do some simple variable renaming, since I did that the other day. Not sure how much it can do beyond that, though.

Other than that, yeah, automated refactoring is just going to be much harder for C++ than for most other languages.

Re:Anyone even using VS 2008 yet?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, just 3.5 access. And much improved stability for large projects. Throw in ReSharper 4.0 in VS 2008 and you have an environment which I have yet to see even close to matched in any other IDE.

Re:Anyone even using VS 2008 yet?

[Tolkien]

Ditto.

Re:Anyone even using VS 2008 yet?

[jbabco]

How about being able to target .NET 1.1, 2.0, 3.0, or 3.5? I thought that was pretty significant. Before, if you wanted to target .NET 1.1, you had to use VS 2003. If you wanted to target 2.0, you had to use 2005. With 2008, you can target any of them.

Not exactly. You can't target any pre-2.0 framework with VS 2005/08/10. It's unfortunate, and is the reason our developers still have to keep a copy of VS 2002 around. There was a community attempt to write a MSBuild extension that could target fw 1.1, but I'm not sure what the status of it is.

Re:Anyone even using VS 2008 yet?

[drfreak]

I'll go one more. I've already moved a couple of projects to VS 2010 to use Parallel.For(); when parsing and creating large text files. Previously, I was using the Task Parallel Library CTP for this in VS 2008. It's super fast on a Quad-Core PC.

Re:Anyone even using VS 2008 yet?

[Anonymous Coward]

I still mostly use Visual Studio 6.0 even though I have VS 2005 on my system.

Re:Anyone even using VS 2008 yet?

[Anonymous Coward]

at my work, we're still a VS 2003 shop...only because we are too lazy to upgrade our (literally) 1 million lines of code to 2005/2008. And some of the 3rd party tools that we use only support VS 2003, so we'd have to upgrade those tools as well to work.

Re:Anyone even using VS 2008 yet?

[Anonymous Coward]

Great, it'll go well with the Yahoo toolbar that the Java update installed.

Re:Anyone even using VS 2008 yet?

[pebs]

I have all three installed - 2008, 2005, and 2003, though I mainly use 2008 these days (just have the other ones around just in case). I don't get what people like about Visual Studio. I personally like Eclipse much much better, and like using Emacs even better than that. Maybe I'm just scarred from having to use Visual Studio's awful Winforms designer. But they could do so much more for C# editing. Intellisense is good and all, but they should look at Eclipse's quick fixes and try pressing CTRL-1 and CTRL-. (Cmd instead of CTRL if you're on a Mac) and all the little shortcuts that allow you breeze through writing Java code in Eclipse. That said, the code editor is fairly good in 2008, just not as good as the competition as far as editing for a verbose language is concerned, and there's very little in VS that really impresses me.

Re:Anyone even using VS 2008 yet?

[alexo]

There are a few C++ refactoring add-ins for Visual Studio
Refactor! for C++
Visual Assist X

How do these two compare?

Re:Anyone even using VS 2008 yet?

[enantiomer2000]

I am using VS2008 for a WPF/WCF project. Do I get 2 cookies?

Re:Anyone even using VS 2008 yet?

[oiron]

And it is getting significantly improved code completion, and on-the-fly error checking in 2010.

If you read the comments in that post, it looks like C++/CLI isn't supported by the new, improved intellisense.

Honestly, we took to calling it "Intellinonsense" at work, given the number of times it fails to complete; you can rate it by failures per second...

Doesn't sound "abandoned" to me.

On the language front, Visual C++ in 2010 gets a bunch of C++0x features: lambdas, type inference (auto), static_assert , rvalue references (&&), and decltype. This is quite a lot, and lambdas are especially nice since they actually let you use STL algorithms as God intended without writing tons of boilerplate code for function objects.

Then also there's Parallel Patterns Library, which provides STL-like algorithms with automatic parallelization.

Yes, the actual c++ compiler and library support has definitely improved. But there seems to be no corresponding improvement in the IDE's functionality. When Visual Assist X becomes a requirement for working with any kind of productivity, it's a rather sad situation. You've got to spend on VS, and then on VA-X for every developer, when the alternative is eclipse with mingw, giving all those above-mentioned features (aka, parts of the standard) for free, and a real usable IDE along with that!

This one is interesting. I do not know of any C++ IDE or plugin that would provide working C++ refactoring, for very simple reason - it is extremely hard to properly parse C++, taking into account all templates and template specializations, and other context-dependent things. Heck, something like a<b>c can be parsed either as expression (a < b) > c, or as a variable declaration a<b> c, depending on the context - and that context, again, includes template instantiations, which form a Turing-complete language that has to be interpreted correctly to produce matching results. I once wrote a C++ program, for fun, which had in it a piece of code as described above, which was parsed and compiled either as expression or as variable declaration depending on whether char type was signed or unsigned was for a given compiler - so you could play with compiler options and get different results. How can IDE possibly handle this?

You can say that it does it for code completion, but the truth is that a lot of it is guessing and heuristics. And there's the catch - when it guesses wrong, at worst, you get a wrong code completion list, or no list at all. But when you do a refactoring like, say, "rename class", and it fails to correctly determine that the class is referenced at some line of code, and doesn't rename it there, then your program no longer compiles...

That said, VS2010 IDE C++ parser (used for code completion and "Go to definition") is EDG-based, so it should be much more accurate - so hopefully we'll get reliable C++ refactoring eventually. Just not in this release.

Eclipse and the still-in-beta KDevelop 4.x give you at least some basic refactoring support. Eclipse has done so for a few years now...

I agree with that, but there are many good thir

Re:Anyone even using VS 2008 yet?

[shutdown -p now]

If you read the comments in that post, it looks like C++/CLI isn't supported by the new, improved intellisense.

Yes, and it's sad - but if it dramatically improves the quality of IntelliSense for native code, then I'm for it.

Speaking of IntelliSense - VC++ is still the only IDE I know of that can tell that std::vector<bool> has member function flip(), but not any other instance of std::vector template. That's 2008 by the way, not even 2010.

Yes, the actual c++ compiler and library support has definitely improved. But there seems to be no corresponding improvement in the IDE's functionality. When Visual Assist X becomes a requirement for working with any kind of productivity, it's a rather sad situation. You've got to spend on VS, and then on VA-X for every developer, when the alternative is eclipse with mingw, giving all those above-mentioned features (aka, parts of the standard) for free, and a real usable IDE along with that!

Do you mean to imply that Eclipse CDT can do code completion and other such things better that standalone VS, much less with Visual Assist? Because, at least as far as code completion goes, I didn't find it (CDT) particularly well working last time I checked. It can handle C well, and trivial C++ with no templates, and that's about it.

Or, you could write in C++/CLI and use the .Net UI

You can, but using C++/CLI that way isn't a well supported or recommended scenario since at least VS2008. Officially, it's intended for interop scenarios, and not to be used as a primary language of the project. Definitely not for UI work. Even the existing WinForms designer has a number of bugs when working with C++/CLI, that, to the best of my knowledge, were never fixed.

Personally, I use Visual Studio at work, because I'm in a C++/C# shop right now. If it were upto me, I'd drop the damn thing like a hot potato and use C++/Python/Java from Eclipse, and do it at no additional cost, too!

I'm genuinely interested - is it because of the price difference, or because you feel that Eclipse is a better C++ IDE overall (and if so, what things are you missing in VS compared to Eclipse?), or because you like Java over C#, or you just want to be cross-platform as much as possible - or something else?

Re:Anyone even using VS 2008 yet?

[Noughmad]

Speaking of IntelliSense - VC++ is still the only IDE I know of that can tell that std::vector has member function flip(), but not any other instance of std::vector template. That's 2008 by the way, not even 2010.

I just checked, KDevelop4 tells that correctly. Then again it's still in beta so probably not for production.

Re:Anyone even using VS 2008 yet?

[shutdown -p now]

Good to hear. Another interesting test is to see how it handles template arguments used in return types - e.g.:

std::vector<std::string> vs;
vs[0]. // should list members of std::string

If it handles that too, throw some std::tr1::bind and boost::lambda at it. It's where VS(2008) gets stuck, especially at the latter - I wonder if anyone has better luck there.

Re:Anyone even using VS 2008 yet?

[Noughmad]

It does list members of std::string (since that it what vs[0] is). Unfortunately I really don't know how to use that bind/lambda thing :(

Re:Anyone even using VS 2008 yet?

[jt2377]

I tried Eclipse while in College and it was god awful slow compare to Visual Studio(.Net 1.1). I have not tried Eclipse since.

Re:Anyone even using VS 2008 yet?

[shutdown -p now]

Here are a few things to try, assuming you have up-to-date gcc (which comes with TR1):

#include <functional>
#include <string>
 
using namespace std;
using namespace std::tr1;
 
string foo(int, int) { return 0; }
 
struct bar
{
  string baz() { return 0; }
};
 
int main()
{
  string s1, s2;
  (s1 + s2).
  (s1 += s2).
  function<string()>()().
  function<string(int)>()(1).
  bind(foo, 1, 2)().
  bind(foo, 1)(2).
  bind(&bar::baz, (bar*)0)().
}

In all cases it should list members of std::string after the dot. VS screws up on almost all of them - it can't understand operator() on std::tr1::function, and it doesn't even display the declaration of std::tr1::bind at all, much less handle its return type. It also doesn't seem to find operator+ for strings, and realize that the return type is string as well. It does however find operator += - I think it's because += is a class member, while + is just a friend global operator.

Re:Anyone even using VS 2008 yet?

[complete loony]

Which is one of the reasons I'm hoping clang can live up to its own hype.

Re:Anyone even using VS 2008 yet?

[zlogic]

Did you use it with more-or-less advanced templates (e.g. anything that actively uses STL or Boost)?

Unfortunately, no. But things like STL iterators and boost::shared_ptr's are correctly recognized by the autocomplete engine.

A compiler parses the code once. It doesn't have to reparse the code constantly as you keep typing or deleting lines, and to do it fast enough that the updates are near-realtime, and yet the user doesn't complain about the sluggishness.

Eclipse does a background reparse for every file after it's saved. And stores the data in an internal database (*.pdom), it's actually quite fast. Visual Studio does the same for autocompletes, creating an *.ncb database.

Re:Anyone even using VS 2008 yet?

[pebs]

I tried Eclipse while in College and it was god awful slow compare to Visual Studio(.Net 1.1). I have not tried Eclipse since.

And this is supposed to be relevant now, how?

I've actually found that all versions of Visual Studio are unbearable slow, even if you have 4GB of RAM, have recent hardware, and it's the only thing running. 2005 was actually slower than 2003. 2008 is about the same speed as 2005 in my subjective observations, though it is doing more in the background now, so I guess its a net gain.

Eclipse is blazing fast in comparison, and I don't consider Eclipse to be any sort of speed demon. If it's slow for you, you probably just haven't tweaked the JVM settings yet (which is necessary, especially if you use a lot of plugins). Also remember that, by default, it's constantly compiling every change you make (at least in Java), but you can turn that off if you like (I don't, I like my compilation errors reported right away).

I'd of course rather be using Emacs than either of those pigs, and use it for anything that's not Java/C#. It's funny, because back in the day Emacs was the pig. Now it's lightweight in comparison to the alternatives.

Re:Anyone even using VS 2008 yet?

[koreaman]

My boss is something of a Microsoft fanboy. I run VS2008 on XP at work (doing ASP.NET development).

Here's hoping VS 2010 will have better support for JavaScript...

Re:Anyone even using VS 2008 yet?

[koreaman]

You are trolling. I often have Visual Studio 2008, ASP.Net on IIS, and several instances of IE8 with several tabs each open, some of them running complex AJAX appliations, and Outlook and OneNote 2007, all open at the same time on my 1-GB XP machine. Works fine. Not snappy and definitely spins up the hard drive, but certainly usable. If you have 4GB (and you don't have some other bottleneck, like a dirt-old processor) you should have zero problems running any version of Visual Studio.

Re:Anyone even using VS 2008 yet?

[shutdown -p now]

Eclipse does a background reparse for every file after it's saved. And stores the data in an internal database (*.pdom), it's actually quite fast. Visual Studio does the same for autocompletes, creating an *.ncb database.

I'm not sure about VS2008 (though it definitely does pick up local variable declarations for code completion without need to save the file), but VS2010 definitely doesn't restrict reparse to on-save only. It actually tries to intelligently parse those parts of the file that are affected by your edits right as you make them.

Re:Anyone even using VS 2008 yet?

[ion.simon.c]

I haven't built KDev4 in a month or so. Have they added even rudimentary GDB integration yet?

Re:Anyone even using VS 2008 yet?

[oiron]

Yes, and it's sad - but if it dramatically improves the quality of IntelliSense for native code, then I'm for it.

Me too, but using C++/CLI is difficult enough as it is, without the lack of any kind of code completion...

Speaking of IntelliSense - VC++ is still the only IDE I know of that can tell that std::vector<bool> has member function flip(), but not any other instance of std::vector template. That's 2008 by the way, not even 2010.

As others said, KDev 4 seems to do it, but CDT just chokes...

Do you mean to imply that Eclipse CDT can do code completion and other such things better that standalone VS, much less with Visual Assist? Because, at least as far as code completion goes, I didn't find it (CDT) particularly well working last time I checked. It can handle C well, and trivial C++ with no templates, and that's about it.

Well, I'd rather have trivial code completion that works every time, rather than see "Intellisense failed, look at the unhelpful help page" about 75% of the time, and spot-on completion for some corner cases. I can handle those corner cases by myself, if I have a stable autocomplete to discover basic information...

You can, but using C++/CLI that way isn't a well supported or recommended scenario since at least VS2008. Officially, it's intended for interop scenarios, and not to be used as a primary language of the project. Definitely not for UI work. Even the existing WinForms designer has a number of bugs when working with C++/CLI, that, to the best of my knowledge, were never fixed.

My point, exactly! Your choices on C++ GUI development are:

• Kill your productivity with Win32API
• Servings of spaghetti ala MFC
• An officially-unsupported-in-this-context C++/CLI (also, it's slow as hell)
• Write your GUI in C# and deal with the places where C# can't handle pointers to your objects
• Use a 3rd party toolkit like Qt or Wx...

I'm genuinely interested - is it because of the price difference, or because you feel that Eclipse is a better C++ IDE overall (and if so, what things are you missing in VS compared to Eclipse?), or because you like Java over C#, or you just want to be cross-platform as much as possible - or something else?

Bit of all, actually... I feel that VS is just not worth the money, if we need to spend on VAX on top of that, and I find that generally many of the other things that Eclipse gives are far more useful than VS. For example, SCM integration is much better in Eclipse (CVS and SVN - SVN has Ankh, CVS has nothing), and like I said earlier, a stable autocompletion is better than a perfect one.

Just so I don't come across as a total MS hater, I definitely prefer C# as a language over Java - it feels much more integrated and powerful. But given all the points in favour of Eclipse, I'd rather deal with Java than with bad C++. Also, Java is more standard for writing browser applets if ever the need arises. The best that MS and VS can offer is Silverlight - no Linux client that does anything useful...

Re:Anyone even using VS 2008 yet?

[oiron]

Handles the + and += quite well, but chokes on function and bind... I don't have a TR1 environment (gcc 4.3.2 here), so I tried using Boost.

Re:Anyone even using VS 2008 yet?

[oiron]

It exists... That's the most one can say...

Re:Anyone even using VS 2008 yet?

[jsight]

If you have 4GB (and you don't have some other bottleneck, like a dirt-old processor) you should have zero problems running any version of Visual Studio.

Thats true.

But get used to Eclipse on the same machine and it'll still seem extremely slow.

Re:Anyone even using VS 2008 yet?

[badkarmadayaccount]

You code in .NET assembly? Hard core.

I tried it, not impressed.

[Anonymous Coward]

I heavily use both Visual Studio 2005 and 2008, so I was excited to use 2010. The thing I found most obnoxious about it was the the text in the code editor was blurry at normal font settings (Consolas 10pt).

Let me restate that. The text in the primary window of the software that you will be staring at for hours daily... is blurry.

How on earth did that get past QA?

Re:I tried it, not impressed.

[Photo_Nut]

I heavily use both Visual Studio 2005 and 2008, so I was excited to use 2010. The thing I found most obnoxious about it was the the text in the code editor was blurry at normal font settings (Consolas 10pt). Let me restate that. The text in the primary window of the software that you will be staring at for hours daily... is blurry. How on earth did that get past QA?

Section 2.4.2.2 of the Readme describes why the code can appear blurry:

2.4.2.2 Text may appear slightly blurry
Text may appear slightly blurry. This can occur with any font, although different users may see different fonts as more or less blurred. MSGothic, the default font for Japanese system locales, is known to be more blurred than other fonts.

To resolve this issue:

We recommend that you keep the default fonts for Visual Studio, for example, Consolas for English SKUs of Visual Studio 2010. There is no alternative that is consistently sharper than MSGothic for Japanese characters, although some users find Meiryo more readable.

TrueType fonts are the least blurred of the non-default fonts. These fonts appear in bold in the font list on the Fonts and Colors page of the Options dialog box (Tools menu, Options, Environment, Fonts and Colors). The WPF and Visual Studio teams are working to improve font rendering in the text editor before the release of Visual Studio 2010.

You can also take a look at this white paper for more information on the issue.
The ClearType Tuner PowerToy can also help. If you are running Windows 7, it's built into the control panel.

Re:I tried it, not impressed.

[Anonymous Coward]

Sadly the real problem is that it uses Windows Presentation Foundation, which renders text in an idealized grid rather than snapping glyphs to a pixel grid. In other words it renders the font exactly as it is supposed to look, and then blends this into the pixel grid, which makes it appear blurry. GDI, on the other hand, will deform the glyphs to fit them into the pixel grid thus offering better readability at the expense of accuracy.

WPF can't render aliased text either, which some people prefer, and also has a silly text animation system that will wait a second before doing the blending meaning (to prevent scrolling artifacts) so that if you scroll fast you'll initially get really blurry text that gradually turns somewhat clearer.

These are well-known problems with WPF, and has always been pushed as "by design" even though it results in horrible text. Microsoft seems to have changed their tune lately and will apparently be adressing the problem in .NET 4. I suspect the reason is because VS 2010 now uses it and the poor text quality was just not acceptable for an application like that.

Messing with the ClearType settings in Windows doesn't really help much, as WPF's renderer is completely separate.

WPF is just a big mess really, and far too complex. I'm all for a new GUI toolkit (even though it's .NET-based), but WPF just isn't it.

Re:I tried it, not impressed.

[shutdown -p now]

The ClearType Tuner PowerToy [microsoft.com] can also help.

It will not, since it only tunes Windows's built-in ClearType renderer. Visual Studio uses WPF, which has its own renderer. There isn't really anything you can do to make it better.

That said, the blurriness is recognized as a problem, and will be fixed for 2010:

We are replacing WPF's text rendering stack in WPF 4.0, and this should allow you to render text with comparable sharpness to what you're used to with GDI. The reason the existing text stack in WPF looks blurrier than GDI's is that GDI text is typically rendered with Compatible Width Layout, whereas WPF's existing text stack always uses Ideal Width Layout. Compatible Width Layout snaps glyphs to pixel boundaries, Ideal Width does not, which is why WPF's text looks blurrier than GDI's. WPF's existing text stack also does not support use of the embedded bitmaps that are included in many fonts and are intended to be used when rendering at smaller sizes.

The new text stack in WPF 4.0 will allow Compatible Width Layout, and it will also support embedded font bitmaps. We believe this will solve all of our text blurriness issues.

Thanks!
-The WPF Graphics Team

It just didn't get into beta 1 yet.

Re:I tried it, not impressed.

[enantiomer2000]

Uh.. Actually, I love programming in WPF. Such rich databinding techniques and comprehensive (now that they finally introduced the datagrid and calendar) libraries. With it, I can program with a whole bunch of jazzy buzzwords like MVVM.

Re:I tried it, not impressed.

[CplusplusDude]

I heavily use both Visual Studio 2005 and 2008, so I was excited to use 2010. The thing I found most obnoxious about it was the the text in the code editor was blurry at normal font settings (Consolas 10pt).

The editor has a new feature: dynamic font resizing. Press ctrl + mouse scroll to change the font size (affects only one document tab). I find this a great feature compared to other IDEs where you have to go through multiple menus to change the font size.

Re:I tried it, not impressed.

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks for the post!

This has been a minor complaint from our QA dept with some of our WPF prototypes over the past few months, and no one had an explanation.

I'll be passing this along Monday. :)

Re:I tried it, not impressed.

[triffid_98]

WPF is just a big mess really, and far too complex. I'm all for a new GUI toolkit (even though it's .NET-based), but WPF just isn't it.

I don't know. It has it's warts, but you can't argue that it makes developing custom controls a heck of a lot easier.

...Now if MS could just make AJAX integration a little nicer. Their auto-generated jscript code is nice if that's really what you wanted but tweaking it when it isn't definitely takes some getting used to.

For the record, I've worked in Eclipse, Netbeans, JEdit, VS03/05/08, Turbo Pascal, emacs and vi. I quite like studio, even if they did totally rip it off from Borland.

Re:I tried it, not impressed.

[Anonymous Coward]

Well I hope to hell that is the case, since I will want to slit my wrists if I have to work with the blurry text rendering that Beta1 currently exhibits.

Re:I tried it, not impressed.

[Acer500]

Ouch. Thanks for the information.... we're looking into using WPF for new developments at work... but text HAS to look sharp, as the gp said, it's what users will be staring into for hours.

Themes

[wzinc]

Whenever MS apps get themes, Office 2k7 for example, they get slower. I'll admit VS 2k10 does look nicer, it really does, but even my Core i7 with cheetah blood thermal compound sits there drawing slow UI. MS, please use native widgets, allow us to disable theming, or whatever it takes to make it go as fast as 2k8.

Re:Themes

[WarwickRyan]

Yes, it is slower. However, being able to put form designer on one monitor and code-view on another makes it all worth while.

Re:Themes

[wzinc]

Oh, you can do that?!? I'll have to look more into it.

Re:Themes

[shutdown -p now]

Yes - you can now drag any document tab out of Visual Studio main window, just as you could to with toolwindows in earlier versions. You can also dock them to window edges, etc.

Re:Themes

[WarwickRyan]

Yup, but you can't dock things onto both monitors. Which is a shame, because if you could configure everything with docking and then save the settings per task it'd rock.

Imagine being able to configure the IDE for the following function with full docking:

a) Form design. Form designer with toolbox on one screen. Codebehind with solution explorer and the build/fault box on the other.

b) Object orientated development. Code window on one screen, vertically orientated widescreen, book style. Class and Solution explorer on the second screen, orientated horizontally. Probably space for an webbrowser / documentation there too.

c) Debugging. Debug screens one one screen (code window, console, call stack, watch window) and production code the other (same as most people do in 2005).

If I could define those configurations, save them to the menu and then change at will it'd rock.

Re:Themes

[shutdown -p now]

Yup, but you can't dock things onto both monitors.

Can you clarify what you mean by "docking things onto a monitor"? Do you mean docking to screen edges?

Re:Themes

[snkline]

This is one of the features I've been looking forward to in 2010, and while it is nice in the beta, I hope they can improve upon it before release. I think the most irksome thing, is that while the windows can float, they are still linked to the main interface. So for example, if I've pulled a code window out to my right monitor, and bring something up above Visual Studio in my left monitor, as soon as I click the code window VS in my left monitor comes to the front. If I minimize VS, the ripped away code window goes away as well. Furthermore, you have only basic sizing control of the torn away window, you can't individually minimize it. I have no idea if these things are even something they could do with the new WPF UI architecture, but they would be nice.

Re:Themes

[IICV]

I'll admit VS 2k10 does look nicer, it really does, but even my Core i7 with cheetah blood thermal compound sits there drawing slow UI.

... what.

Re:Themes

[WarwickRyan]

Well, you have these 'docking points' on monitor 1. There are 6 IIRC - two to each side and one above/below. When you dock the window into these places, they stay maximised and in the relevent corner.

On the second monitor they're just floating windows. Meaning no maximise = you're left with seeing really big borders = annoying.

That's on Vista with Aero..

Re:Let me get this out of the way...

[thetoadwarrior]

I have used Visual Studio and got bored with it. Point & Click programming isn't cool.

Re:oh

[whitefang1121]

Where is my +1 gross button, cause that deserves it

Not just parallel

[shutdown -p now]

ParallelFX is definitely interesting, but I'd say that another very major addition is Visual F# - to the best of my knowledge, this is the first time a primarily functional language goes mainstream, and gets documentation, tooling (IDE/debugging/profiling), and general support on par with the likes of C# and VB. It's not Haskell (read: no typeclasses), and it's not quite OCaml either (no functors), even though the core language is recognizably ML. But it's got most of the nice FP bits OCaml has to offer, some syntactic sugar on top of that (e.g. ability to declare locals as mutable when needed, and arithmetic operators overloaded for all numeric types), and it's got direct and full access to one of the largest class libraries on the market today.

(I'm sure someone will remind me of Scala, which is in many ways similar to F#. It's definitely comparable, but its tooling support is lagging behind, and, most importantly, it's not backed by any of the "big players" in Java land - not Sun, not Google, not IBM - or indeed, any other company.)

The second, smaller, but still interesting bit is improved language interop. It seems that, as new core (i.e. MS-supported) .NET languages are added to the batch, the framework itself is extended as needed to provide primitives for them where more than one language uses them. For example, both F# and IronPython work with tuples, but they have previously each defined their own type for that - and so .NET 4 introduces the standard System.Tuple type, and all languages are changed to use that. So now you can actually make a tuple in IronPython, and pattern-match it in F# - nice.

Another bit along the same lines is C# 4 dynamic type - which is nothing but opt-in duck typing - and the associated DLR framework for exposing runtime dynamic type information in a common way. This means that static/dynamic language interop on .NET is now two-way - previously, you could easily call C# class methods from IronPython/IronRuby, but there was no easy way to call methods on IronPython/IronRuby objects in C# - but now you can do the latter just as easily.

Re:Not just parallel

[Abcd1234]

the first time a primarily functional language goes mainstream, and gets documentation, tooling (IDE/debugging/profiling), and general support on par with the likes of C# and VB.

a) Being included in VS != mainstream. We'll see if it actually gets used by anyone (I'm betting not, but who knows, I could be wrong), and

b) Erlang, a functional language, has had quite advanced tooling (fancy IDE, GUI builder, debugger, etc) for some time now (and it wouldn't surprise me if other languages did, as well).

Re:Not just parallel

[shutdown -p now]

Being included in VS != mainstream. We'll see if it actually gets used by anyone (I'm betting not, but who knows, I could be wrong)

It's already being used by some companies. The fact that you do not know about it doesn't mean that it doesn't happen - and I apologize that I can't be more specific... :)

It just happens to have a fairly specific target niche, which is financial and scientific calculations. It's not something you're supposed to write your shiny WPF UI applications in (even though you can).

By the way, one nice F#-specific feature that I've missed is units of measurement in the type system (the only other language I know that has that is Fortress, and then there's a C++ template library for that in Boost). Again, it's obviously most useful in scientific and engineering computations.

Re:Not just parallel

[EvanED]

Not to disagree, but the nice thing about this is that if you're doing .Net programming, my impression is it should be pretty easy to integrate F# code into your project, easier than most foreign function interfaces since F# is complied to .Net classes behind the scenes anyway.

Re:Not just parallel

[Abcd1234]

It's already being used by some companies. The fact that you do not know about it doesn't mean that it doesn't happen - and I apologize that I can't be more specific... :)

Hah, I believe you mean *a* company. ;)

Again, we'll see... to be quite frank, I'm firmly convinced that functional programming is just far too confusing for most people, and so it'll never truly go mainstream (I can definitely see niche penetration, but that's not mainstream is it? :), regardless of the tooling and vendor support available. But, hey, I could be wrong.

As an aside, F# does have one huge advantage going for it: the ability to very easily incorporate it as a component in a larger project that *is* implemented in a mainstream language. So you can write most of your app in nice, friendly C#, and use F# where its advantages really shine.

Re:Not just parallel

[Abcd1234]

Yeah, I can definitely agree with that. But that's hardly mainstream, at least as I define it. That is, accepted by developers as a language to do primary development in (similarly, assembly isn't mainstream, even though it's sometimes integrated into larger projects written in another language (eg, C)).

Re:Not just parallel

[shutdown -p now]

Again, we'll see... to be quite frank, I'm firmly convinced that functional programming is just far too confusing for most people, and so it'll never truly go mainstream (I can definitely see niche penetration, but that's not mainstream is it? :), regardless of the tooling and vendor support available. But, hey, I could be wrong.

You're probably right regarding full-fledged FP, but FP techniques have certainly been making inroads in the last 10 years or so. First-class functions have gone from an arcane concept to something every mainstream language today has in one way or another (even Java has a castrated version of it in form of anonymous inner classes). Python, Ruby, and now C# programmers happily use map/filter/fold (or whatever it's called in their libraries) as opposed to hand-coding loops. And so on.

To that extent, it should be noted that F# is not a pure functional language a la Haskell - it has mutable locals and fields, it has strictly imperative constructs such as loops or if-without-else, it is eager and not lazy, and it has well-defined evaluation order. In practice, it can just as easily be used as "advanced C#" - exploiting its better type inference, using pattern matching as a glorified typeswitch, and simply enjoying the little bits like inline array/list/sequence generators or anonymous objects - and ignore the traditional FP patterns and approaches. When used that way, it gets really close to Scala. And, in fact, I suspect that it's how most people on .NET will use it in the end.

As an aside, F# does have one huge advantage going for it: the ability to very easily incorporate it as a component in a larger project that *is* implemented in a mainstream language. So you can write most of your app in nice, friendly C#, and use F# where its advantages really shine.

That is very true, and the F# team has stated many times that it is indeed the intended goal. It's why VS2010 doesn't come with visual UI designers for F#, for example - it can be done, but what's the point? But if I need to e.g. write a parser for my .NET project, I would very strongly consider using F# + FParsec for it - it's just so much concise, easier, and more powerful than all available C# solutions.

Re:Not just parallel

[EvanED]

Oh, I agree; there's a lot to be seen for whether or not it catches on at all, and it's definitely not mainstream yet.

That said, for Microsoft shops, the overhead of using F# is probably less than almost any other functional language now, so there's a small chance it will actually take a little bit of a hold.

(There are other things like SISC -- a Scheme implementation that runs on the JVM -- and IronPython (not really functional but definitely closer than, say, C) which runs on .Net, but none have the name behind it. Unfortunate as it is, that may may a small difference.)

I don't expect F# to become mainstream, but it'd be nice to see it get some use.

Re:Not just parallel

[zerojoker]

As someone who is currently doing academic programming in Ocaml, I can only agree and stress the significance of adding F#. Microsoft is actively pushing functional programming into the industry.
Sure, I don't expect that it will reach the popularity of C# of VB.net, but coming from Ocaml, it's just fantastic:

- finally a proper IDE with code completion and just... a _real_ IDE (sorry, but emacs + tuareg-mode is no comparison)

- finally a usable debugger. The gdb-like thing deployed with ocaml is just a joke

- proper documentation. I really have to credit Microsoft here for providing excellent documentation, even encouraging or paying capable authors to write a book

Re:oh

[Anonymous Coward]

virgin

programming environment for dummies

[Anonymous Coward]

it is just needed like everything else.

Re:Let me get this out of the way...

[Ethanol-fueled]

I have used Slashdot and got bored with it. Cut and paste trolling isn't cool.

Regarding C++

[xquark]

Compatibility and conformance with standards (TR1), also going that extra step forward and implementing some of the upcoming 0x features I can truly say that since VS05 MS has gone a long way. WRT Language/IDE/Debug integration nothing comes close in the OSS world for the C++ language (and please don't say CDT, I've tried using 5 and it can't even do the simple C++ syntax properly let alone templates or even simple metaprograms).

Disappointing/sad thing with VS10 is that a lot of the interesting source code metric/analysis stuff is only available for C++\CLI. For pure C++ code metrics I've been pinning my hopes for the past 5 years on someone getting around to implementing to-do #6 of doxygen.

Great!

[Saija]

For a living i've to code in .net & windows(well, there's some legacy in unix servers too but that's another story), and let me tell you: Visual Studio is awesome, i lets you develop some quick and dirty apps just easy, the intellisense feature and the forms designer are some of the best out there(yeah, i know, there's netbeans and qt designer, but francally, the netbeans designer, aka matisse has it's issues, the qt counterpart don't know much), but nothing that i know beats Vs.

Re:Great!

[sys.stdout.write]

That was an 87 word sentence! This just might be a new record!

Fix the D@mn Help Files

[Nom du Keyboard]

I wish they'd fix the d@mn VS help files. Visual Studio 5/6 had easy to read, easy to use help file system that reached its end with the MSDN Library of October 2001.

The VS.NET help files have been Crap from the very beginning, and at least through 2008 have remained Crap to try to read and understand compared to their VS 6 predecessors. Whatever "genius" they hired to revamp the system into something more trendy should be stripped naked, dusted with itching powder, and hung out to rot!

Re:Fix the D@mn Help Files

[twoDigitIq]

I haven't used the VS help system since 6 either, but it's damn easy to just google it anyway.

Re:Let me get this out of the way...

[scumdamn]

I use it and I actually write code. Of course I happen to prefer a fun, eclectic mix of XSLT, jquery, and ASP.Net. To be honest, I get a little gleeful when I crack open a new XSL stylesheet.

Nice, yes, but perf issues...

[tomk]

I tried out VS2010 and found it to have some nice improvements; though nothing earth-shattering for me personally, it has some little things that are nice-to-have, and I can see how those things would improve productivity. But I had such severe performance problems I had to give up using it.

In a solution with 12 C# projects and 3 C++ projects, compiling takes around 5 minutes (took under a minute with VS2008) and hangs the UI completely for nearly the entire time. It also seems to not honor dependencies quite right, because compiling a second time with changes in only one project without downstream dependencies still takes nearly as long.

I sincerely hope Microsoft invests some more effort in the performance side of things prior to RTM, if they do, I'll be happy to upgrade.

Anyone still using Visual Studio 6?

[wandazulu]

VC6, to me, is the '57 Chevy of IDEs; it's out of date, lacking in features, isn't to everyone's tastes, but just keeps on runnin' with a strange magic that Microsoft has never been able to reproduce in its later versions. I've used every VS version since 2, and all the versions after 6 were plagued by bugginess, general slowness, and, here's the real subjective part, a feeling of fragility that I never experienced with VC6. I have used VS8 quite a bit and while I appreciate having a more up-to-date compiler (stupid BS "security warnings" aside), VC6 still, for whatever reason, remains the IDE I want to use if I have to write Windows-specific C++.

Frankly, I don't *want* to use VC6, just like I don't want to put a bottle of lead-substitute into my gas tank every time I fill up, it's just that it has that perfect mix of speed, usefulness, and the ability to get out of my way that none of the .net versions have been able to capture.

Re:Anyone still using Visual Studio 6?

[harry666t]

Long ago... VS6 was my first contact with C++. Well, yes, I'm young ;P

I don't have any particular feelings about that tool... Just as I don't have about any other. I always use whatever fits the task, what I know the best, what I'm comfortable with. It's usually Emacs nowadays... It was VS6 back in the day because I was a clueless newbie, that is what I had at hand, and what has worked for me.

Re:Anyone still using Visual Studio 6?

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree, I use 2008 now, but vc6 is still on my desktop, and whenever I fireup v6 I am amazed at the speed and quality. I long for a vc6 IDE with the updated features of 2008.

Re:Anyone still using Visual Studio 6?

[shutdown -p now]

VC6, to me, is the '57 Chevy of IDEs; it's out of date, lacking in features, isn't to everyone's tastes, but just keeps on runnin' with a strange magic that Microsoft has never been able to reproduce in its later versions.

Sufficiently advanced magic is not easily reproducible, even by those who have originally made it. ~

Re:Anyone still using Visual Studio 6?

[Anonymous Coward]

FWIW, as a consultant, I still have clients who require VC++6, and even VB6. I have one client that still requires VC++1.52 (for DOS-based industrial control software).

- T

Re:Anyone still using Visual Studio 6?

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't it possible that what is happening is that you got used to VC6 and you just don't have the will power to get to use anything else?

Re:Anyone still using Visual Studio 6?

[Rycross]

Pretty much what happened to me. I was big on VC++6 and refused to use VC++.Net. Eventually I misplaced my copy of VC++6 and had to upgrade to .Net. After a little while of getting used to it, I realized that I was much more productive in the newer version. Using older versions in the computer labs at college made me realize how crufty VC++6 was.

Re:Anyone still using Visual Studio 6?

[EastCoastSurfer]

Where I work we have 2 small file processing apps that were written in VB6. They are slated to be converted/upgraded/made obsolete at some point, but new features keep taking precedence over changing the 2 working apps.

Re:Anyone still using Visual Studio 6?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sadly, yes. We have a long-running project with enough idiosyncrasies that it will still not run properly when compiled with newer compilers. Mostly due to dependence on non-standard behavior from pre-C++98 era code... :(

I cringe every time I have to work on that project.

Re:Anyone still using Visual Studio 6?

[Anonymous Coward]

You left out another ironic similarity of VS6 to old muscle cars - it was the last VS release produced in America, by the "old guard" of MS programmers :)

That probably also explains the slowness and general "blah" feeling of newer VS releases - outsourced codemonkeys getting a 1000page spec from Redmond, writing a bunch of "object oriented" code (like a big java project, you know the deal).

Re:Anyone still using Visual Studio 6?

[robindch]

Yep, still using VC6 ten years and half a million lines of C++ later. Don't want to, but heavens above, it's a productive, fast and rock-solid environment. I've installed the later compilers and got my gear up and running. Kind of. But the later compilers feel flaky, jerky and brittle. And none of them have ClassWizard, which which you can drive with the keyboard. Fast.

I'll install VC2010 and who knows, perhaps I'll switch. I'd like to, but MS, please make it easy!

Re:oh

[Yvan256]

It's not THAT hard:

developers! developers! developers! developers!
developers! developers! developers! developers!
developers! developers! developers! developers!
developers! developers! developers! developers!
developers! developers! developers! developers!
developers! developers! developers! developers!

See? You can easily split that between four cores.

Re:oh

[Anonymous Coward]

using System.Linq;
 
var developers = Parallel.Repeat("developers", 8);

*extremely* old news

[Anonymous Coward]

First Look?

Hello and welcome to 8 months ago.

Re:oh

[Anonymous Coward]

Threading isn't actually that difficult. It's remarkably easy splitting a task up into bits that run in different threads, or even on different cores.

The challenge is in syncing the cores up afterwards. If one core has to wait, or finishes after an unpredictably long time, that can really mess things up, since then one or more cores may be waiting idle rather than doing anything...

The solution to that is to find a way to predict how long something will take. (One company did that with that extra RISC SLI chip on certain boards, which improves SLI efficiency)

The easiest(read: slacker) way to do it is just completely branch off separate tasks. (Ex: Run all sound or graphics processing on separate cores. The cores won't be taxed heavily, but since the tasks are usually unrelated, there's no syncing involved when they're done; they just sit idle, and when the pyshics or game logic is done being processed, they get a new frame/data to work with.) This is actually what Supreme Commander did. On a quad core, most of the cores are only loaded about 40%, with the main core loaded 100%. It tries to split pathfinding and physics up, but all the rendering is apparently still on the main core.

Re:oh

[e2d2]

It can also do web development using "standard asp.net", just not using the MVC framework which was new in .Net 3.5.

Top 3 features

[alphabetsoup]

Quite a bit actually. Personally for me, the top 3 features are:

• F# - Finally a functional programming language with a real chance of becoming mainstream. I personally would have liked Haskell though :(
• Parallel Patterns Library - An STL like library for doing parallel computation. For example, instead of the STL for_each you can use the PPL parallel_for_each. Combine this with lambda functions for best results.
• C++0x goodies - These includes lambdas, auto, rvalue references, etc.

Apart from the above it includes a completely new intellisense for C++, using the EDG frontend. All this in addition to the usual .Net stuff.

Re:Top 3 features

[shutdown -p now]

I personally would have liked Haskell though :(

I'm sure it's possible to get Haskell running on .NET (in fact, rumor it is that it's what they were trying to do before switching to F#). The problem is that if you implement it using the existing CLR, you'll have to build your own framework for Haskell genericity and typeclasses, since CLR is not powerful enough on its own - and then your Haskell code will only be usable from other Haskell code. On the other hand, F# has the advantage that all its constructs are reasonably accessible from other .NET languages.

That said, typeclasses on CLR level sure would be cool. And I recall Don Syme said something about them being a possible addition to F# 2.0, so who knows...

Re:Top 3 features

[weicco]

I played with this some time ago. I'm not really into Haskell, just wanted to see what's so special about it (yes, it has some nice features and I think guards could be a nice addition to C# but the language is not for me I think), so I don't know much about it.

http://haskell.org/visualhaskell//

Re:Top 3 features

[shutdown -p now]

What you've linked to isn't Haskell for .NET - it's just a Visual Studio plugin enabling Haskell development (with GHC backend). It was a pretty neat one, too - but it was abandoned, so the latest version is only working with VS2005.

Anybody writing plugins for 3ds Max 2010...

[Animaether]

Anybody writing plugins for 3ds Max 2010 will have upgraded to 2008, as you practically need 2008 to compile your code into plugins compatible with that release of 3ds Max.

That's a small market, but it serves as a demonstration that there's probably more people using 2008 - maybe not altogether by choice, as in this case - than you'd think.

Re:Anybody writing plugins for 3ds Max 2010...

[tylersoze]

It's funny you should bring up Maya. That's another another one that I'd haven't seen upgraded. Maya 8.0 or 8.5 is the latest we're using. There's much to be said for the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it mentality" when it comes to software upgrades. If it works fine and you've been using it for years and don't want or need the latest version, why upgrade?

Re:Let me get this out of the way...

[e2d2]

Yeah man, I'm also too cool to use Visual Studio. I write all my code using a sword. I'm a bad ass.

Bah, failboat.

[Abcd1234]

So totally wrong on point b. As usually, I'm convolving Eiffel, the OOP language with a fancy IDE, with Erlang, the functional programming language that's focused on parallel programming... *sigh*

I stand by my first point, though. :)

Re:Whatever.

[genghisjahn]

Allow me to introduce you too... http://www.microsoft.com/Express/ There will be VS2010 versions. It's not the high-end dev environment, but it does quite a bit.

Re:oh

[Anonymous Coward]

right next to the "I'm a fag" button.

Re:Let me get this out of the way...

[Rycross]

If you think that writing software in Visual Studio consists of "point and click programming" then you haven't used it enough to have a valid opinion, or at all.

Doesn't impress me...

[bertok]

I gave VS 2010 a try on several machines.

If you have an SSD, it's fine, if a little sluggish, especially the more complex designers like the Entity Framework stuff.

On a harddrive, it's almost unusable, it just churns and churns and churns for what seems like hours. Previously, serious developers needed a big monitor and lots of RAM. Now it's a big monitor, lots of RAM, and an SSD.

Still, the new WPF editor has promise, I like the subtle gradient shading and transparency effects. I think it's a beta issue, but I did notice that when you switch to a new editor window, the text is blurred for about a tenth of a second, then jumps into focus. This is probably a bug in the pixel-snapping they're using, but for a while I thought my eyes were going.

I have seen demos that show that writing a plugin using C# and WPF is now incredibly trivial, so that's interesting, but won't be useful to 90% of the developers out there.

However, most of the rest of the changes appear to be cosmetic.

The new APIs in the 4.0 .NET framework don't impress me at all. The parallel library is a JOKE compared to the Oswego parallel programming library that SUN merged into Java. Microsoft has a bunch of webpages on how "multi core is the future", and "programmers have to start doing threads", but they won't do anything other than the absolute minimum to help the programmers with what is a VERY difficult task. Any decent parallel library is going to need a bag of tools like a "lock free queue", with various queuing styles such as FIFO, LIFO, priority, fixed-length, arbitrary length, and all of them have to have the same interface. Java has had this for YEARS now. Where's my abstract "Executor" interface with a bunch of standard implementations like "immediate, background-thread, thread-pool, asynchronous call, Dispatcher call, etc..."?

Microsoft talks a lot about 'functional' programming, but that's implemented in a half-assed way as well. For example, take the SortedDicitonary<T> class. Looks useful, right? Now try to enumerate all of the values in a certain key range, without having to enumerate the entire container. You can't, because Microsoft forgot that they need to provide a 'range query' method that takes a comparator function, something like:

IEnumerable<KeyValuePair<KeyT,ValueT>> RangeQuery(Func<int, keyT> rangeTest) ...

My biggest gripe is that the Entity Framework GUI designer is STILL a joke. It has a longer list of unsupported features than supported features. It's meant to be a time-saving feature, yet I have to write not one, but THREE mapping files, in XML, by hand, with no tab-complete. Can you FEEL the efficiency? I know I can! And it still doesn't support foreign keys with multiple columns. In general, it can't map to about 50% of the existing schemas out there because of some technical limitation or other.

Re:Doesn't impress me...

[Saija]

If you have an SSD, it's fine, if a little sluggish, especially the more complex designers like the Entity Framework stuff.
On a harddrive, it's almost unusable, it just churns and churns and churns for what seems like hours. Previously, serious developers needed a big monitor and lots of RAM. Now it's a big monitor, lots of RAM, and an SSD.

No trying to be a troll or something, but i think a ssd its a hard drive...

Re:Doesn't impress me...

[bertok]

I think the technical term is 'mass storage device', which encompasses both hard drives and SSDs. Even the term "Solid State Drive" is a bit silly, as there is no "drive" (motor). It's really a Solid State Mass Storage Device, but I guess SSMSD just doesn't roll off the tongue. 8)

Re:Doesn't impress me...

[koreaman]

"Solidstate Storage Device"?

Insensitive Clod

[WED Fan]

I write code on sticky notes, tape them together, scan them in, OCR, email it to my machine with my dev environment and then use a hex editor to manual compile it. I WIN!!!

Re:Insensitive Clod

[Wiener]

I write code on sticky notes, tape them together, scan them in, OCR, email it to my machine with my dev environment and then use a hex editor to manual compile it. I WIN!!!

Oh yeah! I do that while walking uphill, both ways, BACKWARD! Now get off my lawn!

Re:Insensitive Clod

[badkarmadayaccount]

I do that for a living writing Perl with inline SQL queries and APL, on dirty sticky notes, writing with a dirty coffee cup handle and a spray can, in the dark. And scan in with a RAID^HS 6 of RS-232 connected scanners, on an old Mac, with a DOS compatibility card hacked to hold a Transmeta CPU, which, through a hand made serializer, does double duty as a SATA controller. (ATA (mathematical "belongs)" to ISA, which is basically an old x86 bus. )

Re:Whatever.

[wjsteele]

And just to reiterate... it's been free (as in beer) for years!!!

Bill

Re:Whatever.

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually Visual Studio is one of top developer platforms and is used for just about anything you can imagine on a regular basis.

Re:Whatever.

[pete6677]

"worst than most of the ones that come free."

Such as?

Did they fix that bug

[smittyoneeach]

...where VS Rots the Mind?

Re:Whatever.

[mario_grgic]

I find UNIX terminal is the best IDE and developer platform ever created and never duplicated, widely used for just about anything on a regular basis.

native ANSI C/C++ support ....

[NullProg]

Doesn't exist in Visual Studio anymore without some tweaks. If your program targets multiple platforms beyond Microsoft your in for a few headaches.

I wonder if Martin Heller used the VS10 compiler for cross platform Wx/Gtk/Qt development (Check Audacity out). I (or someone) should do this in a future slasdot review.

The OpenWatcom, g++, and Intel compilers are a much better solution if your targeting multiple platforms (ARM, Mac, Power5, Mainframes, cellphones etc.) I use VS6 and GCC, but your mileage may vary.

I appreciate the fact that Microsoft is pushing for VS studio C#/.Net acceptance. As of today, that solution is just as slow and portable as Java is/was ten years ago. For some strange reason I refuse to write a program that takes twenty to thirty megabytes of RAM to run when it should only take two. Why? Because that RAM belongs to the user and the other programs they may be running, not me. Waste not, want not. If you can do it faster and for less RAM in a different language then you owe your users to do so.

And no, I've never written a C/C++ program that was un-secure (yet), thanks for asking. And yes, I like C#/Java programming, I just have deployment issues that I've never recovered from.

My opinion or experiences may not be yours.

Enjoy,

Re:native ANSI C/C++ support ....

[Anonymous Coward]

If you have use Visual Studio 6, you have no rights to comments on Visual Studio.
VS6 dates back to 1997, we're in motherfucking 2009.

VS6 is 11 years old predates the C++ standard. Time to shut the fuck about it and stop comparing it to gcc versions that came out a year ago/

We have a very large C++ application that is compiled with Visual Studio 2005 and gcc on the Linux, and there are no problems.

The idea that Intel C++ is more a more compliant compiler is a myth. We have used it for some of our DLLs and considered using it for more, since it's also on Linux. It's a basic compiler, full of problems with the language, it's very focuses on being code-compatible with Microsoft C++ and doing more theorical optimizations.

Re:native ANSI C/C++ support ....

[Matje]

If you can do it faster and for less RAM in a different language then you owe your users to do so.

4GB (yes Gigabyte) will cost you $75 nowadays. If you let your choice of language be determined by 30MB extra memory usage, you're optimizing the wrong variable (unless you're targetting a memory constricted environment of course). Better select the language that lets you write code the quickest. Considering the lack of refactoring support for C++ mentioned in other posts, I'd say C# should be a lot faster to write code for.

Re:native ANSI C/C++ support ....

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, I think you have it backwards. Unless you are absolutely fine excluding all older, cheaper or otherwise heavily used systems you should care about those 30 MB.
I personally have one system with 256 MB, one with 1 GB and one with 3 GB RAM, and that is not counting e.g. my router with 32 MB. If you consider 4GB "normal" your program will disqualify itself for about 2 out of 3 of my systems. If I had to use things like Eclipse, OpenOffice or Xilinx synthesis tools it'd probably have excluded itself for 3 out of 3, particularly since an additional 4 GB won't help any when using 32 bit XP (or is your motto also "why support anything but 64 bit Vista? The OEM version is only $60"? Just in case you don't know, you can't use the 64 bit versions if you still depend on some 16 bit program).
And btw. a 4GB module (which you'd need if you wanted a netbook with 4GB, though it might not work anyway) would cost more like $400.

Re:native ANSI C/C++ support ....

[gbjbaanb]

If you let your choice of language be determined by 30MB extra memory usage, you're optimizing the wrong variable (unless you're targetting a memory constricted environment of course).

Of course I'm targetting a memory-constricted environment. My users run office 2007, and I run Visual Studio with SQL Server Management Studio! I *need* that 3GB.

Re:native ANSI C/C++ support ....

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, what a picky little person you are.

Re:native ANSI C/C++ support ....

[Your.Master]

Maybe 4GB is too high of a baseline (depending on the product), but 256MB definitely puts you deep in the long tail.

Re:native ANSI C/C++ support ....

[Anonymous Coward]

Let me emphasize "depending on the product".
And I guess you are either thinking of far more heavyweight stuff than ordinary or you just don't know how much (or actually little) RAM most software needs.
Ubuntu 8.04 works really fine (even if a bit sluggish at times) with those 256MB, including OpenOffice, Firefox, Thunderbird, Google Earth, of course you should not usually use more than one of those.
Also my main point was that there are still a lot of ancient systems around, if you waste 30 MB here, 100 MB there etc. they definitely won't be your customers (yes, I am quite sure your product is not interesting enough to make them upgrade, even if it cost $1).
So just ignoring 30 MB because "4GB costs $75" is unreasonable. Those users who care about 30 MB might e.g. be the last 10 % of users you'd need to be successful. Of course they might also be completely irrelevant, but if you verified that then the "Unless you are absolutely fine excluding all older, cheaper or otherwise heavily used systems" part of my previous post is fullfilled and your reasoning is sane, not just based on your inflated idea of what a "normal" PC is.

Re:Whatever.

[shutdown -p now]

I find UNIX terminal is the best IDE and developer platform ever created and never duplicated

"UNIX terminal"? Like, using cat/sed/awk to edit files?

If you actually mean Vim or Emacs, then say so (because, among other things, they aren't tied to Unix shell - I can happily use Vim, even in console mode, together with PowerShell on Windows).

Still waiting for Eclipse to load.

[tjstork]

I'm not a big lover of Visual Studio for C++ development - my preferred environment was KDevelop before it was broken in the rush to KDE 4.0, so, I would love to agree with you about Eclipse being good for C++. I just wasn't all that impressed. Right now, a pretty good pair is Visual C++ and a plug-in that Microsoft lets you download that works pretty well.

Re:Still waiting for Eclipse to load.

[zlogic]

Could you please tell the name of the plugin? :-)
I'm currently using Eclipse for editing code and showing mingw's GCC errors in the code and Visual Studio for compiling and debugging. Every time I switch IDE's a message box asks if I want to update the files changes in another IDE.

WPF is an abortion.

[tjstork]

WPF being in .NET essentially means that native development on Windows is dead.

Re:Whatever.

[mario_grgic]

vi is considered standard UNIX tool. These days most UNIX flavors use VIM as standard vi.

But there is more to software development than just editing text files (even thought it's the one thing we spend most time doing).

But I'm talking about the integrated part of it. UNIX was designed by programmers for programmers. It does have a steep learning curve but in my opinion is worth it. Once you get proficient it's hard to match with anything else.

Re:Yay! [Bloat-A-Matic]

[Tablizer]

No kidding. Something has happened to our programming languages to make them more verbose than COBOL even. We've simply automated the verbosity with auto-guess IDE's instead of simplifying our languages and libraries. It's as if we are paid in volume alone.

NORMAL

    print(a + b);

BLOATED

    am = new math.ArithmeticManager();
    opA = new math.Operand((float) a);
    opB = new math.Operand((float) b);
    am.addOperand(opA);
    am.addOperand(opB);
    am.operator = new math.operators.Addition();
    am.executeMathOperation();
    system.io.output.print(am.mathOperationResult());

Re:Whatever.

[Reservoir Penguin]

Emacs and Vim work best when paired with a real Unix environment, I know because I can't stand VS and use mingw/msys with Emacs and Console2 when I'm forced to develop in Windows.

No Silverlight 3 either

[enantiomer2000]

I also believe that VS2010 Beta doesn't support the Silverlight 3 or RIA Services release that is out just yet.

Does it work for C++?

[david_thornley]

I tried it out with one of the smaller C++ projects we've got at work, and I couldn't get it either to compile or put out useful error messages. I had a similar problem with a C# project. I'm particularly interested in C++. Has anybody gotten it to work converting a VS 2008 project?

One blogger noted that it wouldn't compile the standard "Hello, world!" program without fiddling with the properties. Apparently, it didn't like having a main() function, and wanted something like _tmain(). That should be fixed by the next available version.

Re:Does it work for C++?

[gparent]

One blogger noted that it wouldn't compile the standard "Hello, world!" program without fiddling with the properties. Apparently, it didn't like having a main() function, and wanted something like _tmain(). That should be fixed by the next available version.

Probably, since this doesn't happen in the 2008 version. It can be fixed by making an empty project instead of a Win32 Console one, I think.

Re:Does it work for C++?

[david_thornley]

Herb Sutter, who heads up VC++ these days, said in a comment on his blog that he considered that a problem and it was going to get fixed.

Fork/Join in Java

[guardia]

Java 7 will have something very similar, called the fork/join framework: http://developers.sun.com/learning/javaoneonline/j1sessn.jsp?sessn=TS-5515&yr=2008&track=javase Doug Lea also offers a preliminary package for Java 6 that can be downloaded from here: http://gee.cs.oswego.edu/dl/concurrency-interest/

Re:Yay! [Bloat-A-Matic]

[wisty]

Ah, yes, the "Manager" un-pattern.

Used by programmers who what a thing that sort of, you know, manages, their code. Like an interface, or factory, or facade, or adapter, or something like that. You know, like a manager.

Main competitor KDevelop 4.0 Beta3 released!

[G3ckoG33k]

Main competitor KDevelop 4.0 Beta3 released! Read more at http://www.kdevelop.org/

Re:oh

[Anpheus]

Whoosh?

Does it make secure programming easy?

[Anonymous Coward]

I recently downloaded the free Visual Studio developer package from Microsoft and found it did not even have "snprintf" - from C99.

It did have _snprintf and sprintf_s but ... will someone at Microsoft pull their head in and make writing compatible, portable, secure, software easy for everyone?

Does their latest offering have strlcpy() and friends? Or do they have their own variation (strcpy_s()) just because they're Microsoft and they can?

F# is interesting, but it's not free

[Ed Avis]

Knowing that F# came out of Microsoft Research and that some other .NET code has been released as free software by Microsoft in the past, I was hoping that the F# compiler would be free software too. Sadly this is not the case - at least as far as the licence in fsharp.zip here is concerned; it's distributable for non-commercial use only. So while F# looks very interesting, for now it's something of a Microsoft lock-in, and I won't be adopting it because it removes the possibility of porting to Mono.

Re:F# is interesting, but it's not free

[Ed Avis]

I should add, you can build stuff with the non-free F# compiler and run it under Mono; and you can run the compiler itself under Mono; but it's still non-free and so not something I'd want to rely on.

Re:F# is interesting, but it's not free

[shutdown -p now]

Knowing that F# came out of Microsoft Research and that some other .NET code has been released as free software by Microsoft in the past, I was hoping that the F# compiler would be free software too. Sadly this is not the case - at least as far as the licence in fsharp.zip here is concerned; it's distributable for non-commercial use only. So while F# looks very interesting, for now it's something of a Microsoft lock-in, and I won't be adopting it because it removes the possibility of porting to Mono.

Don Syme said, and more recently confirmed, that F# will be released under MS-PL (effectively a BSDL with patent clause) for the VS2010 release - it's only "shared source" currently because it is still in beta.

Re:F# is interesting, but it's not free

[Ed Avis]

That's great news! I'll check it out and see if (when finally made free) it can be packaged for Fedora.

Re:Let me get this out of the way...

[Anonymous Coward]

If you think VS is "point and click" you've obviously never used it.

What's VS? IDE vs. VM vs. platform?

[jonaskoelker]

Personally for me, the top 3 features are: [F#, a library, C++0x]

Forgive me for being ignorant, but...

What is VS? I always thought of it as an IDE, which my devil's dictionary describes as "an editor with a compile button and delusions of grandeur."

So does VS now have syntax coloring and a compile button for F#? Or is VS something else, such as package containing {a compiler, an IDE}?

Then you start talking about libraries... so, VS is {IDE, compiler, libraries}? Does it have a VM for anything as well, or... ?

Exactly what is VS?

Re:What's VS? IDE vs. VM vs. platform?

[Haeleth]

so, VS is {IDE, compiler, libraries}?

Exactly. But in the Windows world, "IDE" has always implied {IDE, compiler, libraries}, so people just say "IDE". Hence "integrated development environment". The idea being that one product contained everything you needed to develop.

This isn't just a Microsoft thing; other Windows IDEs such as Delphi were always the same.

I believe the Java world uses "IDE" to mean something slightly different, but that's a newer usage; the compiler-and-libraries-included sense was the original one.

Re:What's VS? IDE vs. VM vs. platform?

[Rycross]

It has an "editor with a compiler" (and code/keyword completion), and integrated debugger (huge), refactoring tools, sdks (compiler, libraries, tools), integrated unit testing, and project management. Your definition of an IDE is pretty far off base.

Re:oh

[gbjbaanb]

its not hard at all - slap a openmp pragma on your for loop and you're done. Of course, your loop has to fulfill some obvious requirements of simplicity like not being able to update a variable in one thread and also use it in a different thread (but you can have variables in each thread you combine at the end of the task, for example).

Re:Whatever.

[RightSaidFred99]

Schmidt349: managing to be wrong twice in a sentence with only 17 words.

Re:Whatever.

[badkarmadayaccount]

/usr/bin/emacs is my login shell, you insensitive clod!

Yeah...

[tjstork]

It's DevExpress Refactor! for C++. The link is there:

http://www.devexpress.com/Products/Visual_Studio_Add-in/RefactorCPP/

It's a free download and it works pretty well, I have to say.