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...

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

[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

[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.

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.

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

[Njorthbiatr]

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

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

[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

[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: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: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.

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

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?

[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

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: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: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:It's official: GCC is dead

[Billly Gates]

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

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: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: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.

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...

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...