Slashdot Mirror


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."

31 of 198 comments (clear)

  1. Who cares? by faragon · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Visual Studio 2010 was already bloated and brain-dead. TFS sucks and the Git integration is poor. Not worth it, in my opinion.

    1. Re: Who cares? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

      Both VS and TFS 2012 were massive improvements over the 2010 editions for what its worth. 2013 seems more iterative and superfluous.

    2. Re: Who cares? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I disagree

      VS2012 was massive improvement in terms of features. Unfortunately, those features consumed A LOT of resources, to the point it was completely unusable on my computer (on start, after a few minutes, VS2012 would show a message saying "your computer is too slow for VS2012").

      VS2013 is as feature rich (actually, more) than VS2012 *and* it consumes LESS resources than 2010. I have been using it since the Preview (with ReSharper and a few more plugins) and it's great.

    3. Re: Who cares? by ATMAvatar · · Score: 3, Informative

      My experience was the opposite. VS2012 was night-and-day faster than VS2010 on my work machine, if only because it was much better at multi-threading. My peers had a similar experience. Perhaps my experience was different due to the fact that I don't run that many plug-ins.

      VS2013 is an improvement as well, so I am curious to see how quickly I can get an upgrade approved.

      --
      "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
    4. Re:Who cares? by ILongForDarkness · · Score: 3, Interesting

      VS2012 doesn't support XP as far as I know since .Net 4.5 doesn't run there and the main thing with VS2012 was support for Metro. So that ship has sailed.

      I don't think it is vendor lock in to expect developers to be using a OS that is less than 10 years old.

    5. Re:Who cares? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      Yes, VS2012 and VS2013 still support XP. I'm running some stuff on Server 2003 right now, that I compiled with VS2013RC.

      Here's how it's done:
      Windows XP Targeting with C++ in Visual Studio 2012

      Works exactly the same in VS2013 also.

    6. Re: Who cares? by Xest · · Score: 2

      It was the UI that made me hate 2012. The largely black and white themed icons slowed me down in finding the file I wanted in solution explorer in larger projects which was fucking annoying. It took some used to having the menu bars shouting at you all the time too.

      I also hate the fact that it's a step backwards feature wise in some ways also, no more automated generation of unit tests for a class when using MSTest for example. I've also found NuGet can be quite annoying with it breaking once or twice and me manually having to fix my project.

      I've gotten used to it now, but all in all I preferred 2010. I never had any performance issues with it in the first place, so I've not noticed any kind of speed up in 2012 because there was seemingly no human perceivable speed up to be had on my hardware.

      Still, I'll download 2013 tonight and have a look. It sounds like it's addressed some of the problems I had with 2012 at least and the OP's post was stupid.

      VS2010 bloated? Where exactly. Braindead? What does that even mean? It's stupid? So why does it have the best Intellisense and automated refactoring tools on the market then? TFS sucks? Justification please? Git integration is poor? Go fix it then. That's the open source mantra isn't it?

    7. Re: Who cares? by mrchaotica · · Score: 2

      I guess I don't know... I was working off the premise that Windows applications ought to (and do) have a "standard," consistent look-and-feel, but then I just looked through the UIs of the 10 or so applications I have open right now and pretty much every single one of them is different.

      Maybe the follow-up question should be "why can't Microsoft be less schizophrenic about UI standards?"

      --

      "[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz

  2. Programs! by TechyImmigrant · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.
    1. Re:Programs! by TechyImmigrant · · Score: 2

      Be careful what you ask for. Computers are vindictive. One that has free reign to misinterpret what you are asking for it going to be nothing but trouble.

      --
      I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
    2. Re:Programs! by OzPeter · · Score: 3, Funny

      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.

      Yeah and I remember hand crafting make files in order to build systems from all that carefully written C code.
       
      I mean I really hate myself for clicking on the NuGet package manager that I installed in VS, browsing a huge number of open source solutions and downloading and installing libraries and libraries of useful code with almost a single click. Yeah .. progress sucks

      --
      I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
    3. Re:Programs! by murdocj · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Using lots of libraries and components is great... when it all works. When your app won't build and you get an obscure error message from some package that you didn't even know you were using, it's not so much fun. I handcrafted make files as well. At least then, I knew what was going on, and what depended on what.

  3. Where is the RPM? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

    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.

  4. Still half-assed C++11 support by mark-t · · Score: 3, Insightful

    (sigh)

    Oh well... maybe next year they'll catch up. Oh wait, that's when C++14 is supposed to be standardized.

    [double facepalm]

    1. Re:Still half-assed C++11 support by slack_justyb · · Score: 2

      C++ standard is evolving fast

      Does no one else find it funny that saying that about five years ago would have been met with "WTF?!!"

      However, I do have to agree, VS still has half-baked C++ support period. It's neat that they have their own .NET stuff for C++, but I think they tend to think about that .NET stuff first and ISO C++ second. That's a shame really because I know quite a few (and maybe it's just the area I'm in) places wanting to hire those with C++11 skills.

      so we can't expect all the compilers to offer an implementation in less than 6 months

      Well the thing about it is that they've had longer than six months to prep for it. Especially for C++11. I get your point, but the other guys tend to build as the standard gets formalized, not wait until it is approved. Heck even the GNU guys are already baking C++1y support. That's what makes me think that my first point is more true than time frame reasons.

      C++11 support isn't so much a need. The neat features brought with the new standard aren't a "MAKE OR BREAK" kind of thing. However, at the risk of making an oxymoron, C++11 new feature sets make C++ a great deal more readable and enjoyable to code in (I know I was like, shwhaaaaatt?!). Which kind of makes the .NET stuff a little less appealing (unless you're targeting the .NET run-time, which in itself is a whole another can of worms) since I've know quite a few folk to code C++.NET because it is easier than ISO C++. The run-time thing, to them, is just an added benefit. I think once a person starts to use C++11, it'll click what makes it great.

      Think about us, poor developers, stuck with...

      You are not forgotten, you have my deepest sympathies if you are still stuck with them.

    2. Re:Still half-assed C++11 support by AstrumPreliator · · Score: 2

      You need to be careful with constexpr as it is not guaranteed to be evaluated at compile time. I don't have a link handy, but if I remember correctly the only time a constexpr function is guaranteed to be evaluated at compile time is if all of it's parameters are constant expressions and it is used in a constant expression. Compilers are of course free to evaluate constexpr functions in other situations, although to my knowledge neither clang nor gcc does this yet.

      In your example "show"_hash and "fill"_hash should be evaluated at compile time. However if you had someFunc(int hash, int runTimeParameter); and you passed "show"_hash to someFunc, there is no guaranteed it will be evaluated at compile time.

  5. Re:zero cost by causality · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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
  6. Re:zero cost by SJHillman · · Score: 3, Insightful

    "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.

  7. Re:Just downgraded something to .NET 2.0 by 0123456 · · Score: 2, Funny

    I thought .NET was dead and the Microsoft future was HTML5 now?

  8. Re: zero cost by tangent · · Score: 3, Informative

    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. :) )

  9. Re:WOW by Gadget_Guy · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  10. Visual Studio? Released? by Jeremiah+Cornelius · · Score: 4, Funny

    On bond, or recognizance?

    --
    "Flyin' in just a sweet place,
    Never been known to fail..."
  11. Re:As a new user of Visual Studio by cbhacking · · Score: 3, Informative

    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...
  12. Re:TFS... by HalfFlat · · Score: 2

    As someone who is obliged to use TFS, I would say that your reading is correct.

  13. Re:Just downgraded something to .NET 2.0 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

  14. Re:The GUI blows by norite · · Score: 2

    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
  15. Re: TFS... by HalfFlat · · Score: 2

    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.

  16. Mandatory registration by andrew3 · · Score: 3, Informative

    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:

    In rare cases, such as problems that are especially difficult to solve, Microsoft may request additional data, including sections of memory (which may include memory shared by any or all applications running at the time the problem occurred), some registry settings, and one or more files from your computer. Your current documents may also be included. When additional data is requested, you can review the data and choose whether or not to send it.

    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.

    1. Re:Mandatory registration by wonkey_monkey · · Score: 2

      Microsoft can remotely target your computer

      When additional data is requested, you can review the data and choose whether or not to send it.

      Interesting use of "target."

      --
      systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
  17. Re:zero cost? by Xest · · Score: 2

    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.

  18. Re:Link to.Net 4.5.1 ? by RaceProUK · · Score: 3, Funny

    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