Visual Studio 2013 Released
jones_supa writes "Final releases of Visual Studio 2013, .NET 4.5.1, and Team Foundation Server 2013 are now available. As part of the new release, the C++ engine implements variadic templates, delegating constructors, non-static data member initializers, uniform initialization, and 'using' aliases. The editor has seen new features, C++ improvements and performance optimizations. Support for Windows 8.1 has been enhanced and the new XAML UI Responsiveness tool and Profile Guided Optimization help to analyze responsiveness in Windows Store apps. Graphics debugging has been furthered to have better C++ AMP tools and a new remote debugger (x86, x64, ARM). As before, MSDN and DreamSpark subscribers can obtain the releases from the respective channels, and the Express edition is available zero cost for all."
Visual Studio 2010 was already bloated and brain-dead. TFS sucks and the Git integration is poor. Not worth it, in my opinion.
I look back with fondness for the times when a program was a set of instructions and declarations written in a programming language, rather than am odd derivative of C++ tied to a billion files in various XML schemas.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
I tried to do
yum localinstall visualstudio-2013.exe
but it wouldn't load on any of my Fedora or CentOS boxes. Tried the same with aptitude on my Debian boxes, same story.
Is someone gonna repackage this for our favorite distro? Really, these guys are worse than Canonical when it comes to supporting the community.
(sigh)
Oh well... maybe next year they'll catch up. Oh wait, that's when C++14 is supposed to be standardized.
[double facepalm]
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Apple, for instance, only charges $100 to develop on the iPad, giving the tools away.
Sure, and the dealership just GAVE ME the car I'm driving after charging me money for it! Wow that was nice of them.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
"I can't even begin to comprehend why MS feels it needs to charge for the product"
I know, right? I don't know why the grocery store charges for hot dogs either. It's just a product.
More apps for the iPad means more app sales, which Apple takes a cut of, so that's a pretty bad example. Microsoft does give away the Express version, which is pretty decent for most non-commercial software.
I thought .NET was dead and the Microsoft future was HTML5 now?
The Express editions have a bunch of arbitrary limitations in them.
The two that bit me were:
1. You can't install plugins. I don't currently use any I can't live without, but several features in VS2013 -- e.g. NuGET, the thumbnail view replacing the scroll bar, better refactoring, visual indent level indication -- started out as plugins. Even if you take the view that eventually, all third-party plugin features eventually make it into the retail version, you're opting into being years behind the current state of the art.
2. The Express editions are artificially siloed into several versions, none of which has all of the features. If you need two features that are in different versions, at best you have to keep bouncing between the editions. If you need both features simultaneously, you're stuffed.
For me, the two features I needed simultaneously were the ability to create a mixed C# and F# program that ran on the desktop. To make a C# desktop app, you naturally need the desktop edition, but that edition doesn't include any F# support. For some demented reason, that's off in the Web edition, where it seems focused on ASP.NET development, not desktop development.
(And if you ask me why F#, well, this is Slashdot, isn't it? If I'd said Haskell instead, you'd just be nodding now. :) )
All this value free for the express edition! gotta thank GNU, if it weren't for them we'd be milked for way less stuff.
Actually, you can thank the Microsoft's own Platform SDK for all this free value. This included a free C++ compiler, and was released at the start of this century. It was originally for MSDN subscribers, but it was released to the public for anyone to download. If you want to thank anyone for this inital free release, I think it would be Watcom C++ which was released as open source in 2000 after commercial development stopped. At the time that was a much bigger competitor to Microsoft's dev kits than any GNU software.
On bond, or recognizance?
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Missing relative to other tools? Not terribly much, honestly; I wouldn't use VS for Java (by preference, I'd use NetBeans) or for POSIX native code, but both are possible. Some VS extensions are very handy; there's a tool for finding, installing and updating them called NuGet (should be built into current versions of VS, I think); you may want to check them out although it sounds like you've already found some plugins that you like. The git integration will probably improve over time; there has already been an update or two. Eclipse has slightly more refactoring power than is built into VS, but there are plugins for that and the Eclipse UI drives me nuts when I try to use it. The only major thing that comes to mind is that VS isn't going to run on anything except Windows (unless Wine support for it is a lot better than I remember) so, although there are Linux-compatible IDEs that can read its project files, it might not be the ideal tool for mixed environments.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
As someone who is obliged to use TFS, I would say that your reading is correct.
Apparently you missed the renewed interest in C++. .NET is still very popular, but the .NET team never sold the Windows development team on .NET, who went off in their own direction with Metro and additions to WinAPI. So, if we're talking the past two years, then .NET is definitely not *the* main development framework, it's C++ (i.e. native code). How have you missed this? There have been a ton of articles over the past couple of years analyzing Microsoft's schizophrenia.
Perhaps you were just working really hard on .NET code. There are Perl guys hammering away, still under the belief that Perl is still popular, too.
Flat, minimalist 'design' (And I use that word loosely) is all the rage these days. Take a look at google+ ...it looks fucking hideous. There are plenty of other websites following this shitty trend, miles of brilliant whitespace everywhere, no borders around anything to give it some context, It gives me a headache and ensures I won't visit again. Office 2013 is just as awful; NOT ONLY DO THE RIBBON MENUS SHOUT AT YOU, it's a bland wasteland of empty ideas, with only three colour schemes - brilliant white, off white and slightly more off white.
It all looks bad now, but in 5 years time people will be shaking their heads thinking 'Just what the fuck were we doing?'
-- Fuck Beta
TFS2010 very good? Oh, my.
I've seen: check-ins transpose lines on check out; complete failures to update to actual latest versions of code; and random check-outs of code with no local changes.
Other fun aspects: can't unshelve to anything but the changeset that the shelf came from; industry worst? merge and diff tool; no non-connected way of getting changeset info for automatic version information; despite being a centralized model, local workspaces can't be moved (say, in the advent of hardware failure on a development machine). The only way I can be assured that the check-in state actually correlates with what I have locally is to manually run a compare over the project directory and check.
It's also terribly, astonishly, slow over a VPN. Start typing to make a change, only to have all but the first character thrown away as TFS laboriously attempts to check out the file first.
It is so crushingly painful to use now, that I honestly can't imagine they've fixed all their shit in two years to make TFS2012.
Writing a program in Visual Studio requires mandatory registration, or the program will refuse to start up. This also gives Microsoft to arbitrarily deny specific programmers the ability to publish a program.
Oh, and this, from the VS 2010 Privacy Policy, suggests that Microsoft can remotely target your computer after it does error reporting:
It's somewhat disappointing that Slashdot is used to advertise software like this. Fuck that, I'll stick with free (as in freedom) compilers like GCC, MinGW, LLVM etc. and free IDEs.
What? one minute you're complaining about having to have an account to download, the next you're complaining that they might delete your account that you don't want in the first place.
Then you're jumping to some nonsense conclusion that by terminating your account they'll somehow hack into your computer and delete your software too?
This isn't Google apps. It's not a web based tool.
Where is the real link to the final release of .Net 4.5.1 ???
Here. At a labour rate of $100/h, that would be a charge of $0.01.
No colour or religion ever stopped the bullet from a gun