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Visual Studio vs. Eclipse: a Programmer's Comparison
Nerval's Lobster writes "Developer and editor Jeff Cogswell is back with a comparison of Eclipse and Visual Studio, picking through some common complaints about both platforms and comparing their respective features. 'First, let's talk about usability,' he writes, 'and let's be frank: Neither Eclipse nor Visual Studio is a model for sound usability.' That being said, as an open-source project, Eclipse wins some points for its customizability and compatibility with languages; it's more difficult to modify Visual Studio to meet some programmer needs, which has led to any number of abandoned projects over the years. Microsoft choosing to eliminate macros in recent versions of Visual Studio has also led to some programmer frustrations (and a need for external tools)."
Wait, what? There's a comparison to be made there?
Out of the box, VS wins hands-down.
A developer with sufficient skills can be productive in ....
A developer with sufficient skills can be productive in anything.
vi.
gedit.
emacs/xemacs
Pencil and paper.
And on very VERY rare occasions, I've seen developers who did everything their head and just typed in any old text editor.
And I *freeze*refu*freeze*se to h*freeze*ave anyo*freeze*ne tell me di*freeze*fferently. *freeze*.
There's no point in comparing the two. There's almost 0 crossover between what they are developing for except for a few Node.JS and C++ developers and even those are pretty rare.
This is not a good sign. A developer with sufficient skills can be productive using vi as her IDE...
Eclipse IS slow, period. I work with him for over six years and has ALWAYS been slow compared with a similar IDE that is not based on Java. And not only slow, but terribly buggy. TFA sounds more like an article made by an eclipse fanboy than a developer trying to make a truly honest comparison.
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It isn't nearly as popular (and I don't know why), but Netbeans kicks Eclipses ass. True, they are both memory hogs. But Netbeans doesn't drag and freeze as much. Its commands and interface are a lot more intuitive. Netbeans is also a much better IDE for the web. It handles JavaScript way better than Eclipse and even allows you to debug your JavaScript through a Chrome extension.
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"Studio also requires a working set of about 250 megabytes of memory, while Eclipse requires about 3 megabytes of memory..."
Erm, working set on a newly launched eclipse (no project) takes 13x,xxxK.
Plus working set is actually a GOOD thing - in theory. Imagine two programs which each take 700 megabytes running on a machine with only 1000 (and 24). Imagine them sharing some ... libraries, we could call them, of 500 megs each. So the working set would only be 900! Yay! Disk thrash averted :)
Oh, DLL hell? Ah.
Yes.
Eclipse is like, first you waste half an hour trying to get all the RPM and JVM dependencies fixed up, and no, that's not just a matter of running yum.
Then you launch it and are immediately dazzled by a web portal-style desktop app, which obviously was designed so that everyone's pet feature is available within 3 mouse clicks. The problem is that there are 100's of these features.
Then you get their "hello, world" app to run and debugging, and it works fine.
4. Then you try to debug your app and it runs out of Java heap space.
Then you google and find where in the .ini file you're supposed to increase the memory parameters, so you go do that.
Goto step 4 and repeat. I've given up on Eclipse.
Eclipse's gcc code parser integration is better than IntelliSense. It actually understand OO code. VS struggles badly with understanding OO code. for example, if every class re-implements one virtual function, VS cannot figure out usage of one particular implementation; even if there are object declared with that class.
Thus VS is good for debugging, for everything else in C++... not much so.
For all of those that love Visual Studio for C++ programming, and having used eclipse for some time, I believe Qt Creator is by far a much better alternative, as it has around the same level of functionality of VS+expensive commercial plugins.
Even letting the Qt integration out, It has excellent code completion, shows warnings and errors as you type, provides great refactoring tools, It's extremely lightweight, works with any compiler and any build system, in any platform, integrates with a wide array of debuggers and profilers, has a high degree of customization, and some unique features like the best search/replace I've ever used and the locator (ctrl-k).
The only reason it's not more popular is that most people believes it's only useful for writing Qt applications, which couldn't be further away from the truth. It's simply awesome. If I worked for Digia, I'd try to change the name and promote it to something unrelated to Qt, that way it would be really easy to bring new developers to their platform.
As far as I am concerned, IDEs are largely similar in their view of software development. They are like bloated bureaucracies that one has to deal with to do anything constructive. If you dare have a project format that VS, Eclipse, or what have you, doesn't understand, and you have to set up the environment to do everything manually. I know I sound like I am saying "Get off my lawn," but I am really saying we need to understand the development process better. IDEs obscure it too much. Tools like VIM and Emacs expose 100% of it. (In full disclosure I use VIM, ctags, make, etc.)
We need to come up with the programmer's equivalent of the SAE and define basic tools of the trade. It will never happen, of course, but that's *really* what we are fighting about.
Eclipse however just feels generally clunky. I pause for 20+ seconds just to get code completion prompting to come up in python or java, and half the time its in the wrong context. the perspectives is also really annoying. everytime I go to debug, it halts everything to tell me it wants to switch, and then gives me a 2inch high window for viewing the code, anchoring is weak, and it always seems like I never get back the space I should when I dock a sub-window. Personally I really don't care how extensible my IDE is. any given ide is not going to be able to support all langagues and technologies, so why try to shoehorn it in?
So the conclusion is "both work; each has some flakiness".
That's a long-winded way of saying "meh".
vi or emacs debates anyone?
Absolutely no tool stands up to JetBrains. It is hands down the best software for development. I've recently switched back to Dreamweaver for PHP and Javascript, and realized it's basically just a bloated syntax highlighter. I will stop using it as soon as I get a moment to install something better. It is hands down the WORST IDE. Resharper for Visual Studio makes Visual Studio an excellent IDE. IntelliJ from JetBrains makes it better than any tool-set available in eclipse. And I'll bet you it never takes a day to load. I have no affiliation with JetBrains other than I bought their product.
I run VS Ultimate withe PostSharp and RedGate Reflector. It is really the best set of tools you can get. PostSharp completely helps with cleaning code. Reflector help debug what 3rd party assemblies are doing.
You're comparing an expensive IDE to a free one. I'd be more interested how it compares to a curated Eclipse experience like MyEclipse or a closed source IDE like IntelliJ. All that being said, Eclipse is mostly used by folks using Java or languages that run in the JVM. Visual Studio is going to be used by those on a Microsoft stack.
MSVS needs to get refactoring. This is huge for maintaining large software projects.
In debates about Christianity, there are two groups: those looking for answers, and those looking to just ask questions.
Has anything come close to matching Visual Studio's integrated visual debugging capabilities yet? The only reason I stick with VS (Express) is because I haven't been able to find anything that matches the power of the debugger. If there's an IDE with a better integrated debugger I'd love to know about it.
Visual Studio is a sloppily put-together car. Eclipse is a well-designed and beautifully-crafted horse-drawn carriage. Actually, never mind, it's not well-designed or beautifully-crafted. This guy (an obvious Java-booster, if you've read his previous articles) tries to deal with Eclipse's speed issues off the bat by blaming it on "slow systems." I'm sorry, but taking 500 MB of RAM with nothing loaded is crazy. Eclipse crashes, it hangs, it's just not usable to the same degree as Visual Studio. At home I have a choice of environment, and I choose VS if it's even remotely possible. I'd rather use nano or emacs than Eclipse, and code::blocks is a genuinely viable alternative for the Linux crowd. Just because something doesn't come from Microsoft doesn't mean it's better.
"Eclipse requires about 3 megabytes of memory (depending on what you're using it for)."
If you are using it for anything, I think it probably does use more memory than that. The only other thing I'd note is that the Python Tools for Visual Studio work with CPython, not just IronPython.
The rest of the article isn't that bad, but it does seem like a lot of words to say that both have advantages and disadvantages and are targeted towards different use cases and environments.
I haven't had this issue with Eclipse for quite awhile (at least not the Linux version).
Actually, I was just discussing the other day how I'd started using it again in the last few months and how it seemed much more stable these days, as previously it used to lock up or crash quite regularly (often on code-completion, etc). I'm particularly impressed by how well it generally handles C++ and not just Java. I tried Codeblocks for awhile and while project setup was easier, code-completion was hit-or-miss for various libraries.
Comparing to Visual Studio... well no comparison for anyone who isn't a Windows user.
The newer versions of Visual Studio have some great features unfortunately, usability isn't one of them...
Here is a minor example but exemplifies the entire experience. On windows there is this feature where you can right click and drag an object. Then you are given the choice of copying or moving the object. In VS 2008 that same feature exists within the editor but later versions have removed that feature... Remember, that feature is common throughout MS software but has been removed from their front line development environment. The list goes on... but this example really emphasizes the point.
One more thing, with VS 2008, I'm still able to write software for all platforms with the exception of windows phone... (Since no one uses windows phone... I think I'm safe for a few more years.)
This is the same Jeff Cogswell that has been making the other brain dead comparisons in articles recently. Nerval's Lobster has repeatedly accepted postings from this dolt since Dice bought /. so I assume there's some kind of business relationship Jeff has with Dice.
Google threw out Eclipse to replace it with IntelliJ IDEA as a basis for its Android Studio. Why didn't author consider comparison with IDEA instead of Eclipse? Also Visual Studio is commonly used together with ReSharper, it made sense at least to mention it.
Visual studio works, with any of the languages and works well, Eclipse works well, with Java, anything else its a fight for stability especially if targeting some obscure runtime like MinGW or something, Eclipse is also a pain in the ass to configure for paths and libraries, when it works it works well (with Java).
"One full-time Java programmer told me that he hasn’t had to manually type in any setters and getters in years, and he has a template from which all his objects are typed in automatically, thanks to the code snippet tools in his favorite editor (which isn’t Eclipse—he uses IntelliJ). Clearly, methods of automated typing seem to be a favorite among a lot of programmers. So why did Visual Studio remove a feature that facilitated this? Who knows."
Let's not mention the fact that in C# you don't need to manually type in all the getter/setter junk, just public int MyField {get; set;}
The best IDE I've used is QtCreator, just because it is simple, the UI is clean and it does not get into your way. Lets use the points on this article to add it to the comparsion: - speed: much faster/lean than Eclipse, netbeans and Visual Studio. - usability: second place, have a nice debug view, but nothing as flexible as Eclipse perpective. - overwhelming: first, as I've said, have lots of features that do not make the UI big/fat/dirty. - customizability: last. You basicaly don't, just some panels you can change/add. But this is actually part of it's beauty: keeping the UI clean. - code: while it supports basically C/C++, Qt Crerator is one really good IDE. In one project, made in C++/Boost, that we used VS to build, we had to use QtCreator, as VS could not follow functions/symbols correctly, while QtCreator did without any delay. Plugin support is there, but you will only find a few like doxygen. But I would put it in second, as perspectives and custom-builds (like the Flex Builder IDE) makes Eclipse an all-in-all language and coding support. QtCreator is a really decent IDE, that sadly is not known by most people, but if you are developing a project in C/C++, I recommend you give it a try, you could end up being in love with it ;)
Really, two of the worst IDEs out there. Of the memory bloated ones out there, I can really only stomach the Jetbrains stuff.
Yes I use IDEs for coding, and I want to be confortable using syntax highlight, shortcuts and fancy tools. But the most important feature I want is to have a professional and versatile debug interface.
This article sounds like the propouse of an IDE is to be super fancy text editor.
From my point of view, the capabilities of Visual Studio for debugging are far better developed than the ones in Eclipse.
- My two cents.
>it's more difficult to modify Visual Studio to meet some programmer needs, which has led to any number of abandoned projects over the years.
I really doubt any worthwhile project was abandoned because the user wasn't bright enough to handle Visual Studio without modifications.
But at this very moment i'm about to fire up my gold old blow torch..Nah!
The biggest problem with Visual Studio, for me, at least, is that it only runs on Windows. I use a lot of different operating systems, but Windows isn't among them.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Visual Studio is for MS environments, Eclipse is for the rest.
Please stop even mentioning Jeff Cogswell. Every final word from him is like "Meh. You could do this or that," and he has little to no integrity to his research. He's just a guy giving his unwarranted shitty opinion, and should be relegated to this comments section, not given his own article in the main feed.
"Eclipse requires about 3 megabytes of memory"
Hah! My current instance of Eclipse, with a handful of relatively small Maven modules open, no build in progress, is using about 800MB. If you look at help.eclipse.org you'll also find:
"By default, Eclipse will allocate up to 384 megabytes of Java heap memory"
I'm not so sure I trust the credibility of this author.
it's more difficult to modify Visual Studio to meet some programmer needs, which has led to any number of abandoned projects over the years.
I suppose that since it could be any number and the submitter included none, I am justified in assigning a value of -4.
It is hereby declared that since it is more difficult to modify Visual Studio to meet some programmer needs, -4 projects have been abandoned over the years.
A poor workman blames his tools because picking the correct tool is part of his job, ergo if he's blaming his own tools he failed somewhere.
Lots of decent workmen criticize tools that they don't use anymore. The brake line flare tool I bought from Harbor Freight was terrible; it broke after two uses. You know, just a heads up to others to avoid that one.
Different people prefer different tools.
I set up Eclipse, personally. It's free. It detects and plugs into Cygwin, MinGW, gcc and I can add a cross-compiler by entering a gcc build prefix into a box (just set up a new Eclipse in a VM with the intention of cross-compiling code to ARM, GP2X (a particular ARM device), Linux (32- and 64-), Windows (32- and 64-). It took about 20 minutes to install, and the rest was faffing about getting libraries to compile the same in all architectures (but now it's just a drop-down box and click - and it cross compiles).
It works. It does what I need. It compiles. I can do it on Linux or Windows and it works the same.
It's also fast. God knows what you people are doing but with C99 code, I haven't managed to crash Eclipse or make it churn and I don't sit around waiting for it to do anything (from Helios through to Kepler, on Windows and Ubuntu). Maybe if you're running it on some old sloth of a machine, but if you're programming why don't you have an 8-core, 8Gb machine at minimum nowadays? Hell, my laptop beats that and it cost next to nothing in terms of good laptop prices (sub-£500). The Linux VM I set up for Eclipse has 2Gb RAM and 2 cores running under VMWare on the machine and I'm never really waiting for it to compile unless I do a clean build (and I don't see that compile time should ever really be a huge factor - if you're that worried and have that large a project, stop faffing about with "consumer" programming tools and distcc it or something).
Eclipse has little quirks of setup, like anything, but it's just the same as any other program of a similar complexity. Don't apt-get it. Just install it into a sub-folder in your home (an ultra-powerful feature in itself - keep Helious, Indigo, Juno and Kepler in separate folders and copy/paste/upgrade your whole IDE and workspace when a new version comes out).
Debugging is marvellous. Probably it doesn't do some things that the MS software does but, you know what, it's infinitely better value for money and a darn sight better than struggling with gdb directly.
I don't get it - maybe it USED to be a load of crap, I can't know that. But from Helios onwards, which was my first real exposure to it, it's become my IDE of choice. And you know what? If I want, I can give someone a copy of my VM that has my complete development environment and OS installed on it. 50% of handing off a compile is in the associated libraries, tools, setup and build config rather than what's in the source, and with an open-source environment and an OS IDE, you can just hand them your complete setup.
If I was writing a programming book, I'd bundle an Eclipse VM setup. Most of my first exposure to any language is pissing about for weeks getting the toolchain set up. The most off-putting thing when I was learning programming was all the hoops you have to jump through to get a compiler that knows what it's compiling, from where, and what to do with it.
I don't understand the gripes. Sure, I don't have a billion lines of code in there, but I have large multi-arch ports of gaming frameworks that tie into all sorts of bits. I have 20-30+ libraries inside a single program. I have 100,000 lines of my own C code in just one project. I know people might be doing a LOT more than me. But, fact is, Eclipse is damn-near perfect for that, especially for the amateur / beginner programmer, and you REALLY have to go some to outgrow it. I remember struggling along with some of the early Sun Java IDE's - it was actually easier to just not bother and code on the command-line for my university courses (especially as I'd already started on Java a few years before that on my own).
You can say "it's not for me", sure, but all this "it crashes" and "it's dog slow" crap - I'm not sure I buy it. If it's that easy - reproduce the crash and submit it.
To be honest, I'd be prepared to suffer quite a lot of performance problems when compiling just for the IDE-and-workspace-as-folders concept, the multiple platform availability, and the debugger interface to GDB itself. But I don't - because they aren't there for me at all.
This is typical of Microsoft products: obscure "yes it can" capabilities that you can't rely upon for continuity from version to version. Macros? Poof.
Come on reviewers, picking out chopsticks does not count as "playing the piano". Microsoft products in particular needs to auditioned savagely before giving credence to any self-assigned tick marks, or awarding gold stars for limbo dancing under the bar instead of over the bar on standards compliance. Simon says "That's four noes." Especially in the late nineties, the vast majority of Microsoft product reviews were channelling Paula Abdul. Eventually I burned "yes it can" in a Salem bonfire.
I've used Eclipse fairly heavily for C++ and R and I don't find it sluggish. Yes, it's far from perfect. Docking operations on the newest release went a bit insane on my 22" monitor in portrait mode. Hopefully that's just teething pains early in the release cycle.
I agree with you, Irregardless; for all intensive porpoises, I feel like youre complaint is just spam.
For someone making 6 figures a year spending 100$ for enough memory isn't a big stretch. If you really want to get fancy buy a SSD drive to compile on....
love is just extroverted narcissism
IntelliJ IDEA
Neither Eclipse nor Visual Studio is a model for sound usability
Doesn't do it justice. Visual Studio is the poster child for overhead and over complication. As an embedded, web and desktop developer, it fails on all accounts. I wouldn't use Visual Studio for any single reason, not to mention it's not even cross platform. If you ask a class of kindergarten students to plan an IDE I think you'll find many of there suggestions under the hood. What an IDE should be is slim, light, fast and snappy. It should come with low overhead, work on all major OS's and leave the configuration up to you. Visual Studio is almost the opposite of what an IDE should be.
Eclipse on the other hand is almost just as bad, it's overhead is to the point that it's almost not even worth using. It's menu layout system and over all design are horrible and leave so much to be desired it could be a guide on how not to make a GUI. Apart from that it has a horrible configuration and it's a mess to even use for simple or complex projects, requiring more tweaking then a rocket ship.
So what IDE do I use? I don't! I've worked on huge projects and with out fail all I need is Vi and a toolchain. I've said it over and over that IDE's are really for people that don't want to get work done. A good text editor with features and a solid terminal will serve you better in all aspects of writing and debugging code. For the overhead that all modern IDE's come with I can't think of a reason to use them, they don't give me anything I can't get already with my editor and terminal windows and they don't speed up any aspect of development. Oh and to counter the argument about not being able to see what is in a class or autocompletion, Vi has autocompletion and you need to write the code properly in the first place, I shouldn't have to hunt to figure out what's in your class and if it's just a library that I can't see into then the documentation should be more then capable.
Gee whiz grandpa, I don't think any of the IDEs support punch cards.
What you fail to understand is that all Emacs users are in fact travelers from the 25th century, trying as best they could with primitive technology to create an editing environment as elegant and direct as what they were used to back in their own time-stream.
So while you cackle about punch-cards we Emacs users are rolling our eyes and figuring out which gene of your grandmothers to re-sequence to give you embarrassing flatulence in your thirties.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The ultimate comparison I would be interested in would look at:
Visual Studio
Android Studio (IntelliJ)
XCode
That's kind of the modern set of IDE's.
Since there's not as much overlap in users of each one it would be interesting for users of one platform to see the strengths and weaknesses of the other two.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Good to know.
We'd all been wondering.
Or Sam if you don't like mouse chording.
You decide which is which.
Seems like a pointless comparison. No Java developer would ever use VIsual Studio and no C# developer will ever use Eclipse.
I'm not sure if it is Eclipse or Flashbuilder, but if you go over about 60k lines of code, you start getting type lag that gets progressively worse the more lines of code you write. If you like writing large systems in procedural while using OO sparingly, you can easily end up with 200-400k lines of code in one file.
God spoke to me
Disclaimer: I code/build/compile with vi (vim). Uff. Now that's out of the way, I use Eclipse for the indexing/navigation. Yes, it's slow as molasses but what's the hurry when you are just surfing the code right? VS gives me the creeps.
I was under the impression that for a editor to be considered a "programmers editor" it had to have some kind of programming/macro language built in. Because, sometimes you find yourself repeating some action over and over and over. Dropping to $shellutiilty to perform the same task is basically just admitting your editor sucks.
Bonus points if your editor lets you assign arbitrary keys to the given macro.
Frankly, I sort of gave up on visual studio after version 6 when they decided to rebind all the keys, and started rewriting parts of it in .net. Before that, it was a pretty good C++ environment, after that the C++ functionality took a back seat to the C# functionality that appeared to be trying to replicate visual basic/delphi, and frankly doing a pretty crummy job of it.
Actually, having worked with a couple of ex-microsoft guys in the OS division, my understanding from them is that huge swaths of Microsoft actually use slickedit (IIRC) rather than visual studio. Basically anyone not programming in a .net environment. Maybe that has changed as Microsoft has tried to add support for driver development in VS, but it was definitely frowned on for a while.
Coming from windows I LOVE MSVS, albeit v6.0... Next up I prefer Code::Blocks (codeblocks) for my cross-platform multi-module/sourcefile dev. Or I just use gedit (tabbed & many code/language highlighting plugins), plus a terminal window. I've been on a gedit or vim only spree lately.
I've tried time and time again to like eclipse. I think they have done a pretty good job of providing a lot of useful functionality via plugins. I've even recommended co-workers use it, only to have to later apologize..
The problem is that it always seems like its 90% done. There is always some critical problem that keeps it from working correctly. Plus, the last couple of times I started it, it was such a resource hog, and kept crashing so frequently I couldn't actually use it. Of course i've never used it for java development rather trying to use it for C++ or PHP, so that is probably the real issue. I can only hope that the java portions are more polished.
I am talking C and C++ here:
You cannot beat the feature rich Visual Studio IDE. The latest preview of 2013 is so dang sexy. However, Using Qt as an IDE for a general platform is nice when you have to maintain portability across platforms; or just need a dang feature rich platform toolkit. If you are hardcore Linux, KDevelop is sexy. I think KDevelop IDE is based on Kate.
I use all three, but end up in Visual Studio most of the time.
Visual Studio definitely wins in most categories. The visual designer(s) in VS can't be topped anywhere in the industry. The XML editor is superior. The binary "hex" editor is superior. The built-in memory, performance, concurrency and other profilers don't even exist in Eclipse. The project template system (not to mentionT4 text templates) is also far superior.
how the fuck do you compare the pile of dog shit that is eclipse to ANYTHING? and visual studio is no angel but at least it doesnt completely suck ass like eclipse. visual studio isnt even cross platform i DONT UNDERSTAND THIS COMPARISON AT ALL!!!! so im not even going to click on the article link because it makes absolutely no sense to compare the two.
Sublime++
The incremental Java compilation in Eclipse does have something to do with that IDE. It is definately not javac. So different IDE:s really can compile Java at different speeds.
(Comparing Java to C was dumb, no contest there.)
Any Java developer that knows what's good for him uses IDEA IntelliJ instead:
https://www.jetbrains.com/idea/features/
That would be a better comparison.
Eclipse has been stagnating for a long time now.
I just wish Eclipse could tag and browse code as well as Visual SlickEdit. I have to deal with huge, constantly changing codebases and I couldn't survive without it.
I got hooked using a pirated copy years ago. Once I realized how much money in made me during my stints as a contractor(and because I was able to use it as a deduction!), I finally spent the $300 and bought a copy.
The one thing I wish they would change is needing a license for each platform. I rarely use windows, but when I do I'd like to be able to use my favorite editor without shelling out another couple hundred $$$.
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I have to admit, I've been spoiled by Visual Studio. It's the "Apple" of IDE's--it "just works."
Speed - The author starts out by dismissing reports of Eclipse's slowness, blaming it on the hardware. I have both VS and Eclipse installed on the same machine, with 8 GB RAM and 8 processor cores. Visual Studio runs circles around Eclipse.
Intellisense - works flawlessly in VS. Eclipse takes forever to show the dropdown list of properties or whatever, if it shows it at all. Sometimes I have to backspace and type that . again several times to get it to show something.
Perspectives - I'll turn them off when I figure out how. Why doesn't it switch back when debugging is done?
Flakiness - I keep having problems with the "clean" function not rebuilding the "gen" folder. Or the debugger suddenly stops breaking on breakpoints until I restart Eclipse. Or an incremental update breaks the configuration. Eclipse is NOT the polished machine that VS has become.
If I could easily write Android apps in Visual Studio, I would!
Penny Arcade is funny but in some ways oversimplifies the issue. The 8.1 feature is to add dashboards to the desktop. The first of those is a start dashboard which launches the Metro application launcher. But the potential is there far more. Desktop is going to be further integrated into the new look and feel. There is no escaping the world of tiles.
Well, I guess you've already read the ton of answers that state that if you define the getters and setters, you can modify them in the future, while if you accessed the attribute directly, you couldn't.
That's both true in Java and .Net, and a stupid feature of those languages. There is no reason why you shouldn't be able to change how an attribute is accessed without writting all that boilterplate.
Rethinking email
I think the 2 main points are missed here:
1. If you write c# or for asp.net you have to use vs or your shooting yourself in the leg.
2. If you need to design a gui for c# c++/cli you have to use vs or your shooting yourself in the leg.
Bonus: vim and stuff is good iv seen developers crank out code quicker then it took me to load a project in eclipse without errors. But for gui design/debugging/code tracing vs ultimate takes the crown.
Final conclusion: if you write for cli use vs. Otherwise does not really matter what you use.
Bonus2: an ide is good if your working with a new language and it has autocomplete.
is that they're still not abstracting away from the file system, which IMO remains a major impediment to the advancement of both IDE and source control.
When I was your age we had this same argument, but it was vi and emacs. Now it's become what editor can paste shit from stackoverflow faster.
Not trying to be macho or anything, as I think I'm a pretty noob coder, but I personally love the simplicity and power offered by modern text editors like Sublime Text.
To me, the most important features are that the editor be multi-platform, have a great text editor and fast code searching. Sublime has the best code editor I have ever used, and pretty fast searching in multiple files. It's also very customiseable, works great out of the box with a large number of languages (with pleasant syntax highlighting and default colours) and has plenty of features to help navigate code when working on more complex projects. It isn't free, but at $60 it's cheap enough that I don't care.
Sometimes I think people mainly want an ide for the integrated debugger and build systems more than anything, but depending on your language, these can be extremely unimportant aspects of a good programming environment.
For C#, I live VS. For Java, it's Eclipse all the way. Both are, however, buggy.
Eclipse will randomly crash while loading large projects, then load the next time just fine. It also takes forever for Eclipse 3.8 to initialize all it's "plugins" for web development.
But I wonder if VS still has the most notorious bug it had back in the C/C++ days. If you hit a breakpoint, and were playing a CD in the CD player, the whole machine would crash and blue screen if the player switched to the next track while you were stopped in the break point.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Anyone else?
I used Eclipse back in the day, but my main problem with it was: it's used for Java, and I despise Java. 2nd problem is that everyone seems to have their own set of plug-ins to get it "usable", so on a new project, you have to deal with 3-4 different chefs telling you how you should cook. VS, on the other hand, is usable straight out of the box, and that includes source control, if using TFS. My problems with VS are: 1) it's got this weird breakpoint quirk where deleting a breakpoint during debugging does actually delete it for all sessions, 2) The debugger too often times out on an evaluation (screwing up all other evaluations) or optimizes away BCL variable watches, 3) it sometimes starts blacking out sections of the IDE (a bug that originated with the WPF conversion), 4) the webdev.webserver40.exe process crashes too much, 5) the exception breaking UI is tedious to use, especially with ASP.Net, as you often have to click through all of ASP's initial exceptions or start debugging, bring up the exception window to turn on exceptions, then debug. 6) periodic UI freezes while it does God-knows-what, 7) orphaned devenv.exe and msbuild.exe processes, 7) it likes to send you to the code analysis window by default rather than stay on Solution, and 8) to this day, you do a search on something, and it highlights "Matching", so your next search doesn't keep your last search...it wants to search your solution for "Matching" (I filed a Connect issue with this, but they rejected it; MS and I disagree about who owns focus). But fantastic intellisense, IMO, and the code contract integration kicks serious ass.
You cannot compare the two since Visual Studio is an IDE (code editor, debugger, designer) while Eclipse is a glorified text editor. Really... every programmer knows that.
> For instance, renaming a class method that is called by numerous other classes is a 3 second operation in Eclipse
Lemme guess: if that's your main workload you must be using Java. Or some similar turd.
Every other mutli-document editor I've used the past decade supports switching between files using ctrl-tab. I've read for at least seven years now whines from the Eclipse developers that that is too hard to implement. NetBeans isn't great, but at least you can easily switch between source files with it.
Both Eclipse and Visual Studio are good IDE. They have their advantages and disadvantages so I am hesitant to state "X is better than Y". Having said that, the language you are using will determine which is the more appropriate IDEA. For Java, Python, Ruby, etc, I would go with Eclipse since there are some really good plugins for it. For languages developed/maintained by Microsoft (such as C#, VB.Net, etc), I would go with Visual Studio since it will probably have better built-in support.More about Visual Studio http://net-informations.com/ Microsoft Tutorial. Eclipse can be very messy and unpredictable when working on dynamic web projects due to its annoying interaction with Tomcat Server which fails 73% of time. Visual Studio has IIS server built in it and the user does not have to manually install a messy server like apache tomcat. Eclipse also takes like forever to load workspace while VS has everything well organized to load fast. With Visual Studio everything is straight foward unlike eclipse where u have to keep on configuring settings from its disorganized menu, for some features to work. gever.
One is a professional, high-powered, flexible, IDE for developers of high-quality code in almost any platform and language. The other is a Microsoft product. :P
I'm just throwing it out there, but I had a chance to play with Embarcadero XE3, and am going through the trial of XE4, and if you are looking to write native C++ windows apps, its hands down better than Visual Studio could dream of. It's faster, I prefer Firemonkey to WPF, and its also a bit more portable...can hit Mac desktops as well and there's an IOS version I guess in the works. Plus, if you want to write a standard Windows forms app, I think VCL and all the rich VCL controls is way better than using old resource editor and some hokey MFC.
Just saying. Everyone is talking Eclipse vs Visual Studio, but honestly, Embarcadero is really worth a serious look.
This is my sig.
Has Microsoft made any strides in developer friendliness since Microsoft Programmers' Workbench, released c. 1993?
On vit, on code et puis on meurt.
Back in 2000 I was working on a project and we started in Visual Studio. It took 6 months to get half way through the part of the project I was working on. The team lead decided to try switching us over to Borland C++ Builder.
Due to the differences in how everything was setup I had to rebuild most of what I had already built. 2 days. I was able to use some of the code I wrote in VS, so it probably saved me about 3 days of work. In the next 5 days I finished what would have taken me 6 months in VS. C++ Builder was just so much easier as I would plunk things down and the IDE would write most of the repetitive code for me.
Back then the Borland products were even price competitive. VS has come down a lot in price since then. Last I looked, the Embarcadero products have gone way up. Borland is now called Embarcadero.
VS has caught up a lot with where Builder was 13 years ago, but still hasn't quite caught up on the ease of use, though I think the intellisense is almost there. Of course I hope in 13 years Builder has gotten that much better too.
Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon what's the difference? All steal money from devs and control with walled gardens.
For good multiprocessing design the architecture needs to be explicitly tailored to the problem domain. The GUI builder in MVC has it's own paradigm, and I have never seen or heard of a way to modify what it does. Everyone blindly accepts this because lower level use of the MS GUI system is like removing your own appendix with a rusty spoon and no anesthetic. It's just not worth the pain.
There is a way out, but no one seems willing to do it: design the API to the mutiprocessing code and separately design the GUI. Then figure out what MVS does with the GUI interface, and map that to the API.
What happens instead is the that the GUI threading model becomes intertwined with the code threading model. Because of bad partitioning and unintended interactions everything becomes much more difficult.
I realize that not everyone solves this kind of problem, but it was something that I ran into a lot. To me it epitomizes the MicroSoft model. They remove the ability to choose so they can lock you into their system.
Why is Snark Required?
A request for a feature that nearly every other modern editor or IDE has is moderated downward, but XKCD jokes get moderated upwards nearly every time? I remember when technical people used to use this site.