Visual Studio 2015 Supports CLANG and Android (Emulator Included)

Billly Gates (198444) writes "What would be unthinkable a decade ago is Visual Studio supporting W3C HTML and CSS and now apps on other platforms. Visual Studio 2015 preview is available for download which includes support for LLVM/Clang, Android development, and even Linux development with Mono using Xamarin. A little more detail is here. A tester also found support for Java, ANT, SQL LITE, and WebSocket4web. We see IE improving in terms of more standards and Visual Studio Online even supports IOS and MacOSX development. Is this a new Microsoft emerging? In any case it is nice to have an alternative to Google tools for Android development."

Comments

Download Here

[jamesl]

Visual Studio 2015 Preview Downloads
http://www.visualstudio.com/en...

Re: Download Here

[Anonymous Coward]

Not technically a virus, just crapware.

Embrace has started

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone notice an old strategy revived??

Re:Embrace has started

[Billly Gates]

Or I am thinking perhaps they realized they lost?

I submitted the story but I realize back in the 1980's the same was said of IBM. They gave up when they lost to Microsoft. Today they are fairly open about their standards. DB2 is still proprietary but they have opened a lot of stuff and they charge a ton for consulting and enterprise level stuff.

MS is going the same route is my guess.

Folks I think Google is who we should fear next. Chrome has a lot of -webkit and -blink specific stuff in CSS not in HTML 5. I am not a pro MS troll at all but use to be an anti MS zealot many moons ago but changed.

Either way MS makes lots of software some bad but some really good. Visual Studio is a good one. Windows and IE which are the worst are improving. Office is ok with Excel being great and Outlook being crappy. No different than any other large software company.

Re:Embrace has started

[ATMAvatar]

.NET is all going open source

Several of the ancillary libraries and other projects (Entity Framework, F#, etc.) have been open source for some time, and now .NET core is on GitHub. So far, it's only a handful of the core libraries, but the plan is to flesh out the entire framework.

Re:Embrace has started

[morgauxo]

"use to be an anti MS zealot many moons ago but changed."

I think the real question is WHO changed, us or Microsoft.

Re: Embrace has started

[Cyberax]

Client-side code (WPF) in .NET is utterly dependent on DirectX and porting it to OpenGL is non-trivial and probably futile in the end as it'll be unusable on Android and iOS anyway. We already have QT on Linux, so why bother?

Re: Embrace has started

[maccodemonkey]

The iOS support I've seen so far requires you rewrite any API facing code in the Cocoa APIs. You'll get to do it in C# instead of Swift or Obj-C, but you do have to rewrite.

Not that I'm complaining. I'd hate to see all the Java style train wrecks that would come to the platform from developers blindly hitting recompile buttons.

Re:Embrace has started

[serviscope_minor]

Folks I think Google is who we should fear next. Chrome has a lot of -webkit and -blink specific stuff in CSS not in HTML 5. I am not a pro MS troll at all but use to be an anti MS zealot many moons ago but changed.

MS may be down but they're not out for the count. They somehow managed to get their awful, but heavily patented exFAT filesystem baked into the SDC standard to the extent that some compliant controllers won't even let you format the card as anything else.

It's appaling behaviour and shows the old microsoft is still up to their old tricks.

The thing is there was already an ISO standard filesystem supporting modern features supported read and write by every single major operating system (XP and can read but not write without extra drivers) and a host of minor ones at all.

I format my USB devices UDF now because they work r/w on Windows, Mac and Linux and supports large files and so on.

Re:Embrace has started

[ShanghaiBill]

Anyone notice an old strategy revived??

EEE (embrace-extend-extinguish) only works if
1. You have a dominant market position
2. Your customers are stupid
Microsoft, arguably, still meets the second condition. But for mobile app development, they are not even close to meeting the first. If you go to a mobile app hack-a-thon you will see mostly Macs, and more Linux than Windows. Microsoft is a bit player in this market. They are a follower, not a leader.

Re:Embrace has started

[gbjbaanb]

quite the opposite - Windiv used to keep things rolling along, devdiv kept on trying to break the "Windows experience" with all kinds of crap under the pretence that developers were the most important thing to keep happy (ie fuck users).

Now the strategy ha changed for Microsoft, they've embraced the concept that they do not sell Window desktops, now they sell Azure services and a little bit of some mobile platform that's not doing so well.

So, the new direction is to get everyone working with their cloud offerings instead of trying to keep the dead duck of Windows desktop going (though, note you'll still need a Windows desktop to run Visual Studio....) and I think they feel that if the developer gets used to Windows for development, they'll want the same kind of experience when deploying their programs - even if the client is a html5-based webapp that runs on an iPad or
some Android device.

They have got this embrace thing down pat.

Re: Embrace has started

[Maury Markowitz]

> That's being either mistaken or misleading.

Really? Huh. You see, I'm on the Mono dev list, and they're all saying the exact opposite. "They" including Miguel de Icaza, of course. I think I'll take his word over yours, AC.

> People don't just want to write websites with C#

That's a weird statement. Who cares what they "want"? I know lots and lots of people doing C# websites whether they want to or not.

Re: Embrace has started

[Maury Markowitz]

> Client-side code (WPF) in .NET is utterly dependent on DirectX

Which is why they...

1) allow you to use the platform's native UI, and...
2) developed the new "modern" UI that has no (or few) such dependancies

Re:Embrace has started

[Billly Gates]

Both

I hated MS and created this ANTI MS ID because DOS and Windows were truly horrible in the 1990s. Why use an OS that limits itself with 640k of ram when my 486 has 8 megs and do hacks like memmaker with extended vs expanded ram to make up for deficiencies of an OS that was called quick and dirty 15 freaking years ealier??

Windows added more fragility to the mix on top of that core. I was scared IE which was great was a ploy to stop innovation once Netscaoe couldn't compete and it would turn into an old crappy proprietary browser.

I read my posts from 2002 where I threaten to leave computers since DOJ sided with Microsoft!!

Fastforward today

I use IE now typing this (hell would have froze if I caught myself reading this post back in 2001). It is standards compliant and I have no fear of a monopoly. MS makes free stuff for starving artists and is progressive with price structure as you make more income.

MS Windows is really good and I dare say less buggy than Android. Windows 7 is rock solid and just works. Visual studio supports standards.

I myself am older and pragmatic and realize no one gives a shit about desktop computers or ideals! They want a job done and will I do it and get paid or will they hire someone else? Sadly Linux is part of this unless you run some specific apps on a server. The business need is more important and I like getting paid more than I did back then so it is a win win. Also being in the enterprise and seeing the tears and pain of migrating from XP to Windows 7 (who would have thought people would use a freaking 11 year old OS back in 2001??) I see why MS had to not make Windows great. It's annoying business customers will go elsewhere if they made Windows good as their apps would break. It was them and not MS who held the platform back in those days.

Re:Embrace has started

[Rob Y.]

Mostly right. The thing is, the Windows desktop isn't going anywhere. It'll continue to be a cash cow for at least another generation - if only because of all the proprietary 3rd party stuff that's Windows only. Office document compatibility is only the tip of that iceberg - and one of the easiest to replace.

But for sure, the windows desktop is no longer a growth opportunity for the company. And in Capitalism, 21st century style, growth is all that matters. Most of the computer growth these days is in mobile - and Microsoft would love to be there. But they know they've mostly missed that boat. They still have a chance to the extent that the residual monopoly effect will translate continuing Win8 desktop sales into a healty app store for Metro apps - but that's gonna take time. So for now, they're concentrating on the cloud - where you don't have to win offer millions of customers, and if you provide nice dev tools, you can win over the audience that matters. And that happens to be an audience they were on the verge of losing outright.

So the new regime over there is smart, and it's a new game. Past behavior (and the lingering desktop monopoly) tell me I still don't want them to win it.

Re: Embrace has started

[ConceptJunkie]

I very rarely saw XP crash in a way that wasn't obviously attributable to a hardware/driver issue. Vista blue-screened on me a couple times, but I stopped using after about 2 months because it was such a turd. Windows 7 was better, and Windows 8 is too, once you do what you can to eliminate all the "Metro" stuff. Both of them are still slower than XP in my experience, especially when copying across a network to a Samba share, which I do a lot. But blue-screens are almost a thing of the past in my experience.

Re:Embrace has started

[exomondo]

Anyone notice an old strategy revived??

You mean the strategy stated internally 20 years ago that never worked? It was specifically stated to target Java, and it didn't work, then people claimed it was being used to target web applications and again, it didn't work. How exactly do you think it would work here?

Re: Embrace has started

[AK Marc]

The company you're thinking of is Stac (no k). They were always a competitor -- Microsoft never "worked together" with them.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stac_Electronics#Microsoft_lawsuit

Indicates that Microsoft and Stac Electronics worked together, until Microsoft took the code and ran, using it without permission of license. Given my recollection at the time (I used Stacker before the feature was available in DOS), the Wiki article agrees with my recollection.

Re: Embrace has started

[AK Marc]

Metro is not that bad. It's mostly ignorable. Single key to get to the "regular" desktop, and Metro just becomes a really fancy search screen/badly laid out start menu. Desktop and the ability to pin any application to the taskbar removes most of the need for a start menu.

Re:Embrace has started

[Moondevil]

Same here. Even had an email signature with a statement from Stallman.

Nowadays GNU/Linux is confined to VMs and a travel netbook.

My work and main private laptop run Windows 7. I just bought Windows 8.1 and do consulting work on Java, .NET and C++.

Re: Embrace has started

[AK Marc]

I don't get the problems you mention. Perhaps you are using it wrong. I'm using office 2010, and can see my document while saving without a problem. If you can't do that in 2013, that's not Metro, that's Word. And I can configure Metro to split screen, or just arrange the applications the way I always did, with one on the side, to see two windows at once.

Sounds like you deliberately mis-use it to have something to complain about.

The only way MS gets more apps in their store

[Anonymous Coward]

The only way MS gets more apps in their store is by getting developers to write apps for Windows and Android at the same time.

Re: The only way MS gets more apps in their store

[tom229]

Also, hopefully MS has realized - like Google does - that the future isn't in software licensing. The future is in electronic distribution, and software services that collect information. It's not a great future, but it has been created by a population that is willing to trade their privacy for free stuff. It is what it is. I wouldn't be surprised to see them start to give Windows away in the future.

Re: The only way MS gets more apps in their store

[Eponymous Coward]

That's not Apple's model and Apple is making lots of money too. There's room for more than one model I think.

Re: The only way MS gets more apps in their store

[Spy Handler]

Apple makes most of its money from iphone and ipad sales. Software sales is a tiny percentage of their revenue.

Re: The only way MS gets more apps in their store

[NickFortune]

The future is in electronic distribution, and software services that collect information. It's not a great future, but it has been created by a population that is willing to trade their privacy for free stuff.

A population that is currently willing to make that trade. I think it's only a matter of time before we see a popular backlash against all this pervasive snooping.

Still, I agree that software licensing is unlikely to continue to yield Microsoft scale money into the future. There's so much good, free software out there that it's getting harder and harder for MS to justify the margins they traditionally charge

wouldn't be surprised to see them start to give Windows away in the future.

Hmm... makes sense for the home market, where most users get their OS "free" with the computer and if they do upgrade, it's generally from a friend of a friend who "has a disk".

PC manufacturers do pay, of course, and with desktop sales shrinking, the risk here is probably minimal. In fact if the MS tax is eliminated it could do a lot to stem the rise of Android. Or at least ensure MS' place as a player in the mobile arena.

The problem though is going to be corporate customers. The ones with thousands of desktop systems that do pay. Big corps tend to be conservative about IT upgrades, and by giving Windows away MS would be sacrificing that revenue stream. They're probably reluctant to do that.

Of course, they could just drop the price of the Home Edition (or whatever they're calling it today) to zero and charge for the Pro one. But then they need to make the home edition good enough to be useful, but not so good that business would be happy using it. That's not compromise that's worked well for them in the past.

Maybe we'll see it licenced as "free for personal use". That would be something! :)

Re: The only way MS gets more apps in their store

[Eponymous Coward]

Google makes all of their money selling ads, Microsoft makes their money selling software and services (mostly to businesses), and Apple makes their money selling a hardware/software ecosystem. Apple's cut on software sold in their app store is a multi-billion dollar business all by itself. That's what I was talking about when I said there's room for more than one business model.

Hardware is not what distinguishes a high-margin iPhone from a low-margin but high end Android or Windows Phone. It's the software.

Re: The only way MS gets more apps in their store

[JDG1980]

The problem though is going to be corporate customers. The ones with thousands of desktop systems that do pay. Big corps tend to be conservative about IT upgrades, and by giving Windows away MS would be sacrificing that revenue stream. They're probably reluctant to do that.

Of course, they could just drop the price of the Home Edition (or whatever they're calling it today) to zero and charge for the Pro one. But then they need to make the home edition good enough to be useful, but not so good that business would be happy using it. That's not compromise that's worked well for them in the past.

Actually, it's quite straightforward: the Pro edition can join domains, while the Home edition can't. This by itself will work quite well as a differentiator. Big businesses aren't going to give up Active Directory and Group Policy to save a few bucks on license fees, while home uisers (and some small businesses) won't give a damn.

Re: The only way MS gets more apps in their store

[tom229]

I would say it partly is apple's model. Perhaps not in software services, but certainly in electronic distribution of software. The amount of money they make in their "app store" and iTunes has to be monumental. What they lack in data-mining software services they certainly make up for in convincing everyone that their products are "cool", "just work", and are worth spending an extra 30% on.

Microsoft has targeted other platforms in the past

[terbeaux]

It didn't end well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

We all dance in the streets

[ssufficool]

Finally Microsoft was given me a reason to install Windows on all my machines to support their glorious Visual Studio 2015. I will lock all my projects up in Team Foundations installed on Windows Server.

I use Visual Studio 2012 and TFS currently. I don't know what it is, but it seems to suck all the fun out of programming. Maybe it's just not dangerous enough. The compiler catches most everything and I can't seem to throw segfaults or hide memory leaks. I get my jollies every so often by developing for PHP in C where I am able to churn out leaky crap right along with everyone else.

Re:We all dance in the streets

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed. I used to play around with CMake for my C++ projects for a long time, but then I realized how all that was a few mouse clicks away in VS. That includes library definitions, precompiled headers, project dependencies, linker and compiler options, custom build steps, and so on. The project files are in text format if you also want to modify them manually. And when your code does not compile, you just double-click the error and you jump right in that spot in your code. Nice.

Re:We all dance in the streets

[omtinez]

Have you ever heard of compiler warnings? VS will even warn you about stuff as little as when you use 10l instead of 10L because the lowercase L might be confused with the number 1. If you don't believe me, look at the amount of bugs that magically get fixed once you can compile your code with no warnings using the -w4 flag.

Re:We all dance in the streets

[AqD]

That's NOT enough.

IntelliJ/Resharper/NetBeans/Eclipse do much more, though none of them are for C++. They actually check the logic/flow of data inside a function (not spanning across the boundary yet) and also guess/test nullability of local variables and method arguments.

And they do that in real-time, while you're editing code. Eclipse utilizes their IDE-integrated incremental compiler while IntelliJ/Resharper has their own analyzer which can do relatively well even with broken syntax (missing/extra braces). Resharper's code validation is especially critical on XAML, without which you wouldn't have any idea whether your data-binding paths are wrongly-typed and targeted to wrong types, and there is no way to debug that.

Re:We all dance in the streets

[Shados]

Visual Studio is definitely farther along than IntelliJ was 10 years ago. With Resharper, for obvious reasons, its almost the same thing. Even without, its not too too far behind (most of Resharper's features at this point overlap....people just don't even realize it, having used the plugin for so long and not wanting to learn different keyboard shortcuts).

Overall IntelliJ is still superior IMO (and cheaper, especially if you don't need all the languages, so you can use something more specific like WebStorm or Rubymine), but not by much.

Re:We all dance in the streets

[Njorthbiatr]

So your argument is that the IDE is... Too good?

Re:We all dance in the streets

[phantomfive]

Can't possibly be cheaper anymore considering the new VS edition: "Community" is free

Free.....as long as your team is five people or less, which quite frankly is a rather serious limitation.

Re:We all dance in the streets

[Billly Gates]

Can't possibly be cheaper anymore considering the new VS edition: "Community" is free

What is the difference between community edition and express editions?

Re:We all dance in the streets

[Eponymous Coward]

Do you have any recommendations for C++ tools?

I've used PVS-Studio and was pretty happy with it.

Re:We all dance in the streets

[Daltorak]

Finally Microsoft was given me a reason to install Windows on all my machines to support their glorious Visual Studio 2015. I will lock all my projects up in Team Foundations installed on Windows Server.

I know this is is meant as a jokey comment, but it's worth noting that VS2015 has native Git support as well so Github etc. works without any plugins. (Even has Gravatar support if you turn it on) And it's not some half-assed in-house implementation, either: VS uses the OSS libgit2 library and MS developers are active contributors to that project.

Re:We all dance in the streets

[Shados]

Can't possibly be cheaper anymore considering the new VS edition: "Community" is free

So's IntelliJ's community edition. But if you compare the roughly equivalent tiers above that, IntelliJ's about half the price, give or take.

Re:We all dance in the streets

[phantomfive]

What is the difference between community edition and express editions?

The Express edition was gimped but free.
The Community edition has most of the features of the Pro version, but you can only use it with teams of up to five.

The Express edition is going away.

Re:We all dance in the streets

[Shados]

I'm not sure what your comment has to do with development time static code analysis...Stuff that only runs on a developer's machine or build system never touch the end user's machine...

Re:We all dance in the streets

[phantomfive]

Visual Studio + C# is fine as a development environment. Which is to say, it's not crappier than anything else.

The worrying thing is that Microsoft hasn't changed (they're still a corporation trying to make money, let's be honest), and they'll regain the dominance they once had. If you can't remember why that's a problem, here is a refresher.

Re:We all dance in the streets

[phantomfive]

Oh yeah, and here is yet another reason why it would be a problem. Choice quotes:

Microsoft thought that if people wrote lots and lots of VBA code, they would be locked in to Microsoft Office. They thought that no matter how hard their competitors tried (in those days, they were Borland, Lotus, and, to a far lesser extent, Claris), they would not be able to emulate the VBA programming environment and the gigantic Excel object model perfectly

PS: in researching this article, I tried to open some of my notes which were written in an old version of Word for Windows. Word 2007 refused to open them for "security" reasons and pointed me on a wild-goose chase of knowledge base articles describing obscure registry settings I would have to set to open old files. It is extremely frustrating how much you have to run in place just to keep where you were before with Microsoft's products, where every recent release requires hacks, workarounds, and patches just to get to where you were before.

Re:We all dance in the streets

[NormalVisual]

I know this is is meant as a jokey comment, but it's worth noting that VS2015 has native Git support as well so Github etc. works without any plugins.

VS 2013 (including Community) has Git support out of the box and works just fine with GitHub as well.

Re:We all dance in the streets

[benjymouse]

I know this is is meant as a jokey comment, but it's worth noting that VS2015 has native Git support as well so Github etc. works without any plugins.

VS 2013 (including Community) has Git support out of the box and works just fine with GitHub as well.

Ahem. It works. Sorta. It's slow, mildly confusing and it totally screws up if you use subrepositories. Looking forward to VS2015.

Re:We all dance in the streets

[Billly Gates]

I just imaged my computer and installed express before reading this. Sigh ...

If it is anything like previous versions it means another re-image as I remember I couldn't fully uninstall the learning editions or express of products as they leave .dlls everywhere unless things change.

I will stick with the express editions until I see a reason to change as my weekend is half over. I do web stuff so I do not need anything advanced unless the web edition has more features in the pro? It seams express just has gimped c++ profiling and team support which I do not use.

Re:We all dance in the streets

[Cyberax]

IntelliJ CLion is a new C++ IDE. It's too rough right now, but it's getting usable.

Re:We all dance in the streets

[Billly Gates]

I just installed it for the first time and I see no .PHP or .HTML or HTML5 support in the base nor plugins with the community edition? I am not a troll but I do not see how IntelliJ is better unless you are a android or java user.

I have the express editions of VS which have some javascript support but the lack of .php is annoying.

Re:We all dance in the streets

[lordholm]

CMake is a build system (ok, technically a meta build-system) like make i.e. it can build everything given the right rules and configuration. Most IDEs makes it painful beyond belief to build multi-language projects and especially projects where code is generated by custom tools.

It is not possible to compare CMake with VS, since the usecases are completely different.

CMake/autotools/make/etc is used when:
- you care about portability
- you have multiple languages in your application
- you have a sufficiently complicated setup with lots of autogenerated source files
- you want to have a debuggable build setup

VS/Xcode/Eclipse/Netbeans is usable when:
- you don't care about portability
- you don't care about being able to debug the build
- you don't have complex dependencies in the project

For larger projects, you likely will grow out of even CMake et.al. in that case you can write your own build system using tools like shake.

Re: We all dance in the streets

[AqD]

No they don't, not for C#. It's nearly exclusively provided by plugins such as resharper.

VS actually has some of analysis for C++ now as evident by inclusion of semantic highlighting recently, ahead of their C# support. Perhaps C# isn't their #1 language anymore. But C#/VB.NET with Resharper still beats everything else - they even marked nullability/non-nullability of most parts of .NET Framework API, something that Java guys could have done years ago but never did, and thanks to (lack of) that, their nullability analysis although implemented well is practically useless.

Analysis for C++ code must be much more difficult, however, due to massive use of and the infinite flexibility of C macros. I didn't expect that kind of tool even coming to C/C++.

Re:We all dance in the streets

[Hognoxious]

Sheesh, your mom's basement is big!

Re:We all dance in the streets

[ciantic]

The Community 2013 is way more stable than any of the Express versions, because it is the Visual Studio 2013 Pro, with different licensing. I uninstalled Express few days ago, and I don't think it left a lot of DLLs anywhere, only thing I can find is registry key: HKCU\Software\Microsoft\WDExpress (with Visual Studio it's named HKCU\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio)

Also the Community version supports TypeScript out of the box if it's your cup of tea. I tried to get TypeScript working on Express builds only to find out it was really buggy.

You probably should look at TypeScript in any case if you do web stuff. Because it's the future of JavaScript now that Google has also adopted it with same syntax (and some few ideas on top of it) just with the name "AtScript" by the Angular team. The momentum is pretty high on it. Even though typing would be not in the official specs everything else is ES6.

Re:We all dance in the streets

[gbjbaanb]

1. It worked - where are Borland, Lotus, Claris (ro Workperfect) now?

2. It worked - he upgraded so many times you forgot what your old documents were like.

See, in both cases he handed money to Microsoft, both for Office and again for more Office. It may suck to be him, but Ballmer has been wiping his butt on his dollar bills for some time now.

Ps. I doubt the gigantic VBA object model was intended to destroy the competition, it sure looks more like bloated incompetence from the part of all the people working on it.

Re:We all dance in the streets

[phantomfive]

Ps. I doubt the gigantic VBA object model was intended to destroy the competition, it sure looks more like bloated incompetence from the part of all the people working on it.

The author of that article was the guy who designed VBA, so he would know as well as anyone. It is well known that Microsoft strategically used APIs to destroy competition (Dr. Dos, for example).

Re:We all dance in the streets

[Billly Gates]

Unfortunately it is a no go if IE 8 doesn't support it. Sigh

Yes my business idea is to cater to business customers and it is the new IE 6 of this decade.

Re:We all dance in the streets

[AmiMoJo]

The worrying thing is that Microsoft hasn't changed

That clearly isn't true. Back when they were really evil it was Gates running things. Balmer was an idiot but less malicious, and now they have some other guy who seems to be making a genuine effort to be less of a dick. It makes sense from a business perspective because many of the companies that are doing well in Microsoft's traditional spaces already do that. Google's Android is now the most popular OS in the world, and it's open source. It's no wonder Microsoft now offers Windows 8.1 for free on small screen devices. Even Internet Explorer is mostly standards compliant now.

Obviously the usual corporate tendencies are there, but I don't think anyone can really argue that Microsoft is the same company it was back in the Netscape or Java war days.

Re:We all dance in the streets

[phantomfive]

So, the point is, Microsoft has changed because they are no longer dominant. It's not because they suddenly got nice or friendly.

The question is, if they regain their dominance, will they go back to their evil ways or not? I don't think you can answer that.

Re:We all dance in the streets

[phantomfive]

I think the big feature of the pro edition is Re-sharper support (and other plugins, like Nuget). If you don't care about that, the express edition is fine IMO

Why?

[AqD]

Are they now offering frameworks on top of Android and iOS?

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Doubtful. It's more likely that they just don't like the fact that the Android SDK/NDK is a free download. If people are going to write Android apps, Microsoft wants them to be writing them via Visual Studio, in Windows. Just like they want everything _else_ to be written that way. It's kind of in their best interest.

Probably the only sign that Sadya Nutella has a fraction of a clue, he's bringing the company back to its "embrace, extend, extinguish" roots. Microsoft has no lost love for Linux and it certainly hasn't found any love for it now. They just realize that they're risking becoming irrelevant from the amount of failures they've had over the past 5 or so years, they're sitting on top of probably half a billion worth of unsold Surface and Windows Phone garbage. Then there's Windows 8 of course. An OS so fucking terrible that Valve actually ported all their stuff to Linux rather than risk being locked into the massive pile of shit that was Games for Windows Live.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Please at least write a proper counterargument instead of a lame shill comment like that.

Re:Why?

[behrooz0az]

It's not slow, you have to enable kvm
And this is exactly why I hate windows developers, They have no fucking clue how stuff works in their own OS and blame others for it.
If you can't enable vt-x in your platform fuck off.

Re:One word: Silverlight

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a welcome move from Microsoft. I just hope it doesn't get the Silverlight treatment after a bunch of developers bet on it.

What do you mean by that? Silverlight is doing perfectly fine. There's nothing wrong with it.

Re:One word: Silverlight

[ahabswhale]

You mean other than the fact that they bailed on it?

Does it have a "strict compliance" compiler flag?

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

It is all right and great for Microsoft to support all these additional devices. But does it have a "strict compliance" mode where it supports the features exactly to spec, and no "new, exciting and enhanced features" in it.

In Windows world, they could add non standard features to the software and support it in the OS making a mockery of standard compliance, lock the developers into their platforms, and force the cost of working with/around the "de factor" standard. It would not be as easy to do in Android and Linux, since they are not under Microsoft's control. But since Android and Linux are open source, they might try to pull a fast one and come up with "extended" linux/android, and probably try to pay other vendors to use it. But I don't think it would as easy to kill the standards as it used to be.

Re:Eclipse is doomed!

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been trying to compare Visual Studio and Eclipse for a few weeks now. Sadly, I'm still waiting for Eclipse to actually start up.

Re:One word: Silverlight

[phantomfive]

Because they open-sourced it, it doesn't matter so much if they do. You wouldn't be able to use Visual Studio, but that's not a huge deal anyway.

Re:Does it have a "strict compliance" compiler fla

[Shados]

Since they don't control Android (open source maybe, but the version that ends up on phones is vetoed by Google and fairly tightly controlled), the most they could do is submit patches to it, that could be accepted or declined. They could also bundle extra libraries...like every other Android app toolkit/framework does.

Not much evil to do there. This isn't exactly the first time Microsoft includes support for open source stuff (ie: when they started supporting jquery). They go through the same channels anyone else would.

Re:Eclipse is doomed!

[donaldm]

Err lets see. Time is 14:27:55, types "yum install eclipse" - finishes at 14:34:32, that is 6:37 to do the download with all dependencies, install and checks. Total cost $0.00. Use "app-get" if you are on a Debian based distribution or if you don't like the command line use the GUI installer which works on pretty much all Linux distributions..

Now either run Eclipse from the command line or GUI and wait about 10 seconds then spend 20 seconds configuring. Ok it works for me.

Oh wait I can't run Visual Studio so I can't do a fair comparison.

Windows Phone developement

[Anonymous Coward]

You can install VS2013 for Windows Phone developement only if you have Windows 8 or above installed on your desktop. It doesn't install on a Windows 7 desktop.

75% of Windows Desktop users are on Windows 7 desktop. So this means that a programmer whose isn't currently developing for Windows Phone but wants to casually try it out is most probably not going to be able to. OTOH, you can develop for Android on Windows 7 - i.e. anyone can try out Android Programming casually.

Great work, Microsoft. This is not Bill Gates' Microsoft anymore (for a long time now). A bunch of jokers are running the company. They have locked out a majority of their programmers from developing for Windows Phone.

Re:Eclipse is doomed!

[Shados]

Even if you're on a Mac or Linux, you have so many better options than Eclipse. Don't throw away your sanity AND self respect...

Re:Eclipse is doomed!

[Anonymous Coward]

So I've determined several things based on your comment:

1. You use some Fedora-derived Linux distribution. That's kinda dumb, since they all pretty much suck.

2. Your "app-get" mistake shows you've never used a Debian-based distro. It should be "apt-get", obviously.

3. The operating system you're using is crippled, since it can't run Visual Studio. Windows can run both Visual Studio and Eclipse, so it's clearly your operating system that's lacking in this case.

4. Your attempt at being cocky has backfired on you, and has actually made you look like somewhat of a dickhead.

Re:What is DB2 like?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's pretty much an intermediate stage between DB1 and DB3.

Google Tools?

[Lawrence_Bird]

Last I looked neither Eclipse or Intellij Idea were owned by Google. "Android Studio" is for all intents a repacked IDEA

IDE war - it is like browser war

[postmortem]

.. and MS loses again. MS was left in dust by Netbeans and Eclipse. They do much more, and all for free. Both have strong open source community that shells out useful plugins that extend the many languages that are supported. So finally MS decided to play catch-up game.

And there are some that still believe Visual Studio is the best. In reality VS is same as IE vs rest: IE is slowest, least compliant, least open, least extensible.

Re:IDE war - it is like browser war

[Billly Gates]

I was going to prove you wrong by opening a copy of Netbeans ... it is still loading hold on.

Re:IDE war - it is like browser war

[Maury Markowitz]

> It was easy and I will never come back

Here too. And when you see comments to the contrary, it's always got something to do with it being OSS. "It's slower, and not OSS". But it's not slower, and now it is OSS. It's like listing to people try to convince me that vaccinations are bad for you, you wonder how they can stare bald facts in the face and then say the opposite is true.

Better support than they have for Web?

[Tony Isaac]

Microsoft is better at creating IDEs than just about anybody else for desktop applications. But when it comes to Web development. It was only the last version or two when they finally stopped creating mismatched HTML tags, and the Web page designer is still so unusable that you have to hand-code HTML / JavaScript for anything non-trivial. Maybe these problems have to do with Microsoft not owning the Web platform.

I hope they do a better job with Android. I really want them to do better, because I really hate Eclipse and Java!

Re:Better support than they have for Web?

[MouseTheLuckyDog]

Not better then Borland was.

Re:Better support than they have for Web?

[shutdown -p now]

Have you seen ASP.NET MVC? It doesn't create mismatched tags because, well, it doesn't create tags for you at all.

Re:Better support than they have for Web?

[Bill Dog]

Have you used ASP.NET MVC? Because if you're not using the HTML helpers (which among other things create tags for you), you're doing it wrong. Tags are matched, but you get some line breaks in weird places that make the generated HTML not as neat as I prefer. And the checkbox helper emits two controls instead of one, so that the model binding magic works.

Re:Better support than they have for Web?

[pherthyl]

C++ and Qt already works great on Android with a nice IDE as well.
Bonus: your code will work on iOS and windows phone and blackberry and windows and Linux and Mac at the same time

Re:Better support than they have for Web?

[Tony Isaac]

But Qt has NO Web support. And you either have to use an old version, or go full GPL, or pay.

Yay Xamarin

[WinstonWolfIT]

I've been working with Xamarin's cross-platform support for some time now, and the shared logic between mobile and mobile web pretty much "just works" after you get used to sticking to Xamarin's toolset when targeting multi-platform. I'm keen to see how this all works built into VS.

Re:Yay Xamarin

[Maury Markowitz]

> sticking to Xamarin's toolset

Which, unfortunately, is a serious subset of Mono. I found that every program I tried to port used some code that wasn't supported, and most of our code simply does XML file handling.

Actually, it's difficult to even tell what you have due to MS's totally bizarre naming practices. Why is System.IO.Packaging, which deals with ZIPped XML files, part of WindowsBase? It's practically impossible to go from a namespace to the assembly that contains it. This has always bugged me.

Re:Yay Xamarin

[phantomfive]

It's practically impossible to go from a namespace to the assembly that contains it. This has always bugged me.

This is often a problem with production C# code as well......since C# doesn't force you to use a particular directory structure (and in some ways VS discourages it). As a result, a lot of production C# code has a structure that's a complete mess.

Java, on the other hand, imposes structure, which keeps things somewhat more readable.

Re:Interesting licensing terms

[NormalVisual]

In enterprise organizations (meaning those with >250 PCs or > $1M in annual revenue) no use is permitted beyond the open source, academic research and classroom learning environment scenarios described above.

Re:Eclipse is doomed!

[blackpaw]

It is not recommened to run eclipse form the repos, that way lies endless grief, hassle and wierd plugin incompatibilities.

Best to download the official binaries.

Re:Microsoft has targeted other platforms in the p

[Hognoxious]

I believe that comes in the next phase - "extend".

Re:It's official: GCC is dead

[Billly Gates]

Last a I checked BSD licensed software is also OSS. Just not Stallmans version of it.

Not suprising

[lapm]

This is just nothing more then Microsoft realizing they are loosing it. They lost supercomputers, they lost mobile markets, now Linux is taking over servers, next battle ground is desktop and Linux is starting to make inroads there also... What choice Microsoft has but try to adapt, if they wish to be in business still in 10 years from now?

Re:Not suprising

[OhPlz]

Linux has always been taking over servers, and {year + 1} is always the year Linux is going to take over the desktop.

If anything, MS is tightening whatever it was that got loosed.

Re:It's official: GCC is dead

[serviscope_minor]

Just not Stallmans version of it.

I'm sure if you asked Stallman he'd confirm that it is OSS. You'd also get a lecture on how OSS is not the same as Copyleft and why/how copyleft protects your freedoms.

Re:Eclipse is doomed!

[blackpaw]

Unfortunately true. Gimmie NetBeans for Java Dev any day.

Re:Microsoft has targeted other platforms in the p

[NickFortune]

It doesn't always end badly either.

Remember when Apple owned the word processing market? MS go very standards-friendly and very much into cross-platform this and interoperable-that.

Of course, it only lasted for about as long as it took for Word to dominate the market and then goodbye RTF and "hey guys, how about we make a mockery of the ISO standards process?"

I think what we're seeing here is MS in defensive mode. They'll embrace open source, open standards open sesame, whatever it takes until they're where they want to be in the market. And then, same old same old.

That said, I'm willing to be proven wrong. Time will tell :)

Re:Problem is Visual Studio slow and non-portable

[Maury Markowitz]

> Even the bloated Eclipse is faster than VC++ on Windows - at least if you run Eclipse on Linux

I've run Eclipse on OS X, Windows and Linux. None of those are *remotely* as fast to work with as VS. The fact that Google is trashing Eclipse in favour of Android Studio is proof positive of the problems with Eclipse, and the compile-to-the-metal that both MS and Google are adopting is an indictment of the entire byte code regime, IMHO.

I've also used Xcode and VS head-to-head, and VS is definitely the superior platform. Although Xcode offers many of the same features, and outright superior GIT integration (it's like two clicks and one url to get it working), the indexing system is completely broken so you can't even do things like "find all references". When running one of the CLR languages the superiority of VS is magnified through on-the-fly compiles and such. Xcode claims to offer this, but it's horribly broken, and the late-stage operations like code signing and packaging make it a moot point anyway.

I don't know if you'll ever *really* be able to write iOS apps on VS, but if that day comes, I'd switch in a heartbeat.

Re:One word: Silverlight

[UnknownSoldier]

It is yet-another-tech Microsoft bailed on after it failed to get significant market from Flash and/or HTML5. It is on life support.

> Microsoft announced the end of life of Silverlight 5 in 2021

Reference:

* http://support2.microsoft.com/...
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...

Visual Studio product licenses ..

[lippydude]

"Visual Studio products are offered through a variety of retail and volume licensing sales channels. Except for direct purchases through MSDN Subscriptions or Microsoft Store, licence purchases are made through a software reseller." ref

Re: Eclipse is doomed!

[Anonymous Coward]

Wake me up when *ANY* Debian-based distro gets delta binary updates, or something that mimics the yum fastestmirror plugin.

Re:One word: Silverlight

[Rob Y.]

And it's the reason they bailed on it that's relevant here. Whether Silverlight was or was not great software doesn't matter. It's not cross-platform, so nobody wanted it. Microsoft sees that, and they're smart enough to not make that mistake again. And the marketplace isn't giving them many more chances to make that mistake again - so Metro's mostly a no-show too. That leaves servers and cloud services. Good move, Microsoft, but for you, not necessarily for us...

Re:One word: Silverlight

[terjeber]

Microsoft announces the end of life of a lot of stuff all the time. Various Windows versions, for example. This doesn't mean the end of life of the technology, though SL5 hasn't seen a lot of talk lately. If (and that is a big if) there is a SL6, it will also have and EOL, some time in the decade after SL5.

Re:What is DB2 like?

[wwphx]

IMO, DB2 is pretty sweet. It's much closer to the ISO SQL standard like Microsoft's T-SQL rather than Oracle's PL/SQL. I bought a developer edition a while back and the management console was very familiar to any DBA with Microsoft SQL Server experience. There were a lot of additional stuff that was a little familiar to me from my exposure to mainframes, but I was able to get in and create a database and tables right away without digging in to the documentation, the way Real DBAs do. ;-)

I never worked with trying to get an app written to talk to it, so I don't know anything about their drivers outside of ODBC. I just wish our AS/400 had had the full developer loadout rather than just the runtime tools, it would have made sucking it dry before we retired it so much easier. That 400 was ancient, over 15 years old, but an absolute beast when it came to reliability. It was definitely the most solid box in our server room.

Re:It's official: GCC is dead

[david_thornley]

Stallman does not have a version of OSS. He believes in Free Software, which is functionally but not philosophically the same as Open Source Software. He also considers BSD-licensed software Free Software (Gnu GPL-compatible, non-copyleft to get into the details), although he only recommends such less restrictive licenses for short and simple programs.