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Microsoft Officially Releases Visual Studio 2015 and .NET 4.6
rjmarvin writes: Microsoft has announced RTM of Visual Studio 2015, the latest version of its flagship IDE, along with the release of .NET 4.6. The release includes a new set of DevOps services featuring the Build vNext cross-platform build service, the IntelliTest automated unit testing tool, and a Dev/Test service delivered both via the cloud in Visual Studio Online and on-premises through Team Foundation Server. Soma Somasegar, corporate vice president of the developer division at Microsoft, highlighted three main themes Microsoft focused on with VS 2015 in an interview with SD Times: developer productivity, "a holistic set of DevOps services" and giving developers choices when it comes to tooling toward the goal of building Universal Windows Apps for Windows 10. VS 2015 and .NET 4.6 are available here.
MSPHB jesus we just lost 7 billion on a phone. no one wants our tablet. everyone hates our cloud. we need to release something quick or im out of a job. Whatcha got dev?
dev: another windows is sure--
MSPHB: can it. Everyones up in arms about mandatory updates and the spying it does. whats next.
dev: XBox reports call of madden 19 band of halo brothers is ready to ship! truly--
MSPHB truly some stoner will appreciate it. i need something NEW. something with WOW.
dev: well...uh....
MSPHB what the hell is on your screen...is that...we dont have a visual studio 2015....
dev: so, yeah, its mostly just something we use here, in house. kind of a joke, kind of for realsies...its--
MSPHB: got it, good. Stick the word devops on it, mark it up 60% from last release and throw some words out of the buzzbook on the box.
Good people go to bed earlier.
now, if they just know what they want to do with UniversalApps ..
Will be, err, actually smartphones with Windows ? Which ones ?
I want to buy, by Christmas, a Windows phone .. maybe a flagship like Lumia 940, let's say..
But is MS able to manufacture & launch such things ?
A lot of strange things happen in their court..
PS
I really like the MS band, I would buy one, if available
Yet another set of .NET patches that probably won't install automatically and require manual installation. Something to look forward to next Patch Tuesday. Meh...
When I first started coming to /. an M$ compiler release story would have never been posted. It was irrelevant. Everyone on the site used free software. How sad, and pathetic.
In Windows 8 it slapped a six inch phone UI based on touch on a full fledged 28 inch desktop/laptop screen. Again a fiasco.
It used to talk about "multi-platform support", which on close examination turns out to be support for both WinNT and Win98. Now it talks about Universal Apps. But it is only Universal "Windows" Apps. Again Universal "windows" Apps but limited to Windows10. Where do they come up with names? Do they play some kind of buzzword bingo?
Next they will come up with different editions, from ultra tied down dimwitted home user edition all the way to super professional ultimate platignum azure eye-candy business corporate executive edition.
All these antics used to irritate me so much those days. Now I laugh at myself for having taken them seriously.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
With 2012, our project only takes about twenty minutes to open. With the 2015 beta we tried, it took over forty-five minutes to open.
I am surprised no one has mentioned clang or Android support. If you install mobile it will even install Chrome. No you did not misread that folks
http://saveie6.com/
Release . . . the Windows Phone!
Visual Studio has conflicts every time 2 devs change something in that giant XML project file. Maybe one day Microsoft will understand how to write a diff tool properly. The huge design flaw of partial classes is to blame. Luckily the Java guys at IntelliJ provide team-city to solve it for them.
population as we7l an operating system
To be honest, I'd couldn't have seen even half of the stuff that they shipped every being there when Visual Studio 2013 came out. An Android emulator? Okay. Upcoming Objective-C support? Hum.
It's a big bet that there is enough demand for better cross-platform code sharing for people to start using the Xamarin environment, and it's even a bigger bet that mobile developers will want to bring iOS and Android applications onto Windows.
There is some method to the madness. The Windows Runtime (the engine underneath Universal Apps) and the Core CLR have some compelling technologies that may have appeal outside the Windows ecosystem.
The Windows Runtime is interesting. It is almost completely oriented around asynchronous APIs. Any operation that will (or can) take more than about 50-100 milliseconds will need to have an asynchronous form. Now, the trick is that async/await in C#, promises in JavaScript and Futures in C++ makes consuming that API tolerable (in C#, it's really not hard at all). It is oriented completely around try to make sure that applications can't block and become unresponsive. In short, if you make it harder to do the wrong thing, it will happen less often.
But, the first form was oriented only towards Modern (metro) applications, and we all know how that turned out. The Universal Apps is doubling down on the underlying runtime and support and seeing if they can get better adoption. Hard to say, but it'll be interesting to see how it turns out.
The other interesting front is Android; there's a bunch of libraries that provide alternatives to core Google APIs. I'm fine with that; alternatives are always good. And the Android subsystem in Windows 10, that's interesting.
Anyway, it may bring some hard-core Visual Studio shops into the mobile space, because you can still say "it's all VS". Lastly, it was a price drop. Ultimate doesn't exist anymore, and it's replacement is half the price. Even Premium was more expensive. I half expect more price drops and incentives to drive more people into the ecosystem.
Visual Studio is now advertising partial but significant C++11 support, and they claim only 3 minor features of C++03 are missing.
Of course, this is quite far from the truth, as it is riddled with bugs and nothing really works, but at least they're trying.
I didn't see anything useful on their page--have they made the bloody application 64-bit yet? We've had tonnes of problems with it crashing with extensions like Visual Assist and a couple custom plugins. The whole environment runs out of memory and brings everything attached down with it. It's pretty ridiculous.
I can't tell if the "developers, developers, developers, developers" was intentional or not.
Windows updates you can time with a calender.
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
While we're at it, Python Tools for Visual Studio 2.2 has also been released at the same time. In addition to VS 2015 support, this is mainly a bugfix and do-small-features-that-never-make-the-bar release. If you're a Python developer on Windows, please give it a try, especially if you've never heard about it before. Feel free to tell me that we suck so long as you also file a bug in the tracker. ~
(Full disclosure: I am a developer on the PTVS team.)
Microsoft got its start as a publisher of BASIC interpreters and continues to maintain Visual Basic. In the line-number era, before DEFSTR and DIM...AS statements, all string variable names in BASIC ended in a dollar sign. For example, this was valid code:
In addition, comment subjects on Slashdot are limited to 50 characters, and M$ saves seven.
emacs would be a great IDE if only it had a decent text editor
Does Viper count?
Or, you could just BC...
The compiler and linker have 64-bit versions. Add this environment variable
PreferredToolArchitecture=x64
and the 64-bit compiler and linker are used from an IDE build (this is for C++). The IDE remains 32-bit.
I have worked at Microsoft. I like Microsoft. I think the company is headed in a better direction, generally speaking, even if it has a way to go.
That said - I have only really used Visual Studio since I left Microsoft. Fun fact - many teams don't use Visual Studio, TFS, any of it. I used Visual Studio as a glorified Notepad++ during my time there.
At my current job, we use Visual Studio to write web services in C#. The experience has shocked me. Guys, it's bad. It's really bad. It's even bad at what it's supposed to excel at. If it were free, that would be one thing - I think highly of the Express editions, for instance - but for paid software, this is really unacceptable. Over the course of one project, some of the issues we've experienced include: the 260-character limit of path & file names; what I assume is a bug in the compiler which doesn't force classes to implement interfaces completely in all cases; having to restart the IDE and, in some cases, the system, in order to continue debugging using the SOAP client locally; etc.
Perhaps it has to do with the fact that we're on an old version of VS - we're stuck on 2010. But that is really just a symptom of it being paid software. If it were free, developers would simply download and install the latest version. I suppose we could do that with the Express editions, but I digress.
If there were a point in all my rambling, it would be this: I cannot fathom why any rational actor would choose to develop anything but .NET in Visual Studio. Just learn your language's tools, find a good general purpose editor, and enjoy the latest development tools free of charge. Professional chefs don't use Kraft Mac 'n Cheese and Betty Crocker cake mix.
I stopped upgrading after they took away the icons, have they brought it back in 2015? is it worth looking? why not just create a skin for it and let who ever wants to use it ?
Have they added new refactoring after learning from "resharper"?
They'd make millions.