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