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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."
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.
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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.
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.
Yes, it is slower. However, being able to put form designer on one monitor and code-view on another makes it all worth while.
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.
Arash Partow's Philosophy: Be a person who knows what they don't know, and not a person who doesn't know.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
Quite a bit actually. Personally for me, the top 3 features are:
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.
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.
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.
Sorry about the mess.