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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...
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
Oh really?
http://developers.slashdot.org...
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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/
I don't think emacs belongs in your list. emacs would be a great IDE if only it had a decent text editor.
Blah. It depends on the type of work one is doing. Go ahead and spend the extra 30 minutes writing up the code to do a new form with 3 buttons, some graphical effects, and some text boxes. Then make them resize when the form changes while keeping intelligent ratios. I'll do it in a 1/4 of the time and when a bean counter compares our performance I'll have a better bonus.
Release . . . the Windows Phone!
I've never had a problem with this. Perhaps your workflow is sub-optimal?
LOL Darkain.
Hmm. Nothing for VS 2008 or 2012. The attitude must by cyclic.
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.
Ah! It's nice to know who to blame! :)
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.
Apparently, you've never used a code repository or worked on a team of developers. (No, not even CVS, since even that handles this scenario correctly.)
Let me give you a big-boy-coder lesson. When you work on a team with other people, you have to make changes to the same files as other developers at the same time as they're making changes to them. When you commit your changes, there may be conflicts with the other changes that other developers have made. A "diff tool" is probably the most basic way to determine what changed and how to fit the two versions together so that the combined changes don't break everyone's stuff.
If you check a makefile in, it will be subject to the exact same rules as everything else, and when two developers make changes to it at the same time, you will need to merge those changes in a non-breaking way.
A Visual Studio project file is just a fancy makefile. It's a build script that is used by VS and MSBuild to manage what is and is not included in the build of a given piece of software, and how the build process treats it (some things are compiled, some are precompiled and used for linking, some are resources, some are raw content, etc.). When there are conflicts in that build script, you have to resolve them, and until you do, VS is unable to load a valid project file.
All of that has exactly dick to do with partial classes. Partial classes are just a means of having autogenerated code in the same logical class as hand-written code, while keeping the autogenerated code in a separate physical file from the hand-written code. That is literally the only thing partial classes are supposed to be used for. You have a single class definition split across two or more files so that a code generator doesn't overwrite your non-generated code.
But you're a Java zealot, so keep on with your shitty 90's-era language, your crusty build systems, and your classpath bullshit.
Well, has it changed much. I read the summary above, and it was 100% gibberish. Honestly I understood nothing of what it said. Buzzwords and bullshit. All I know is that there's probably a new version. So, what's the difference between having no MS stories versus having unintelligible MS stories?
Apparently, you missed the news from a while ago about Microsoft releasing the CLR under a free software license. Check it out.
I've been a Slashdot reader since back when it was called Chips & Dips. Back then, Microsoft deserved the M$ appellation. Today, not so much. They're cooperating a lot more with the libre software community. Now, you can either shake your fist at them and scream how they'll never be forgiven for their sins... or you can smile, extend a hand, and welcome them to the party.
The world works better if more people choose the latter. And that applies to life in general, not just Microsoft. :)
The problem is the makefile is XML, which can be ordered without losing any information. The diff tool is likely line-by-line. Therefore, there are "conflicts" because the file is reordered separately on two machines.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
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 use ,Net scaling features for the other direction, WPF apps that are easier for older eyes.
Uniform scaling for forms that aren't 1080 size is very much appreciated by those that want/need it.
And it's trivial to add to WPF forms. And fully independent scaling (user selected rather than resizing by dragging) is also easy as it is simple to add scroll bars to an application. I haven't done this yet but looked into it.
It's also a fantastic demo moment (everyone with imperfect eyes goes "Ohhh!").
The only people that won't appreciate it are picky UX test subjects, they ask about the empty columns when the form's aspect ratio changes (preventing this is a bit tricky, but certainly doable).
BlameBillCosby.com
I think you will find a lot of people here just want somebody to hate. MS has dropped proprietary platform-specific extensions in favor of chasing standards compliance, their big-ticket product MS Office is now available on Linux with Office365 (and native apps on OS X, iOS and Android), they're soliciting and responding to feedback from the community (Windows Insider and XBox kinect, back compat and internet connectivity) and they are releasing a lot of open source software along with the patent promise.
They're doing exactly the sort of things you would want a company like that to do because these days MS is a different company run by different people operating in a different environment. And when you consider that despite the 20-odd years of Windows hate it is still the dominant desktop operating system by a very wide margin, the last few years of change are a good thing.
Sounds like the PEBKAC to me.
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...
You do need special considerations for XML files though - there are several solutions
The weakest solution is to rely on the ability of the target user to spot diffs and correctly merge XML files. And also not to use automatic merging, ever, because the nature of XML files means that conflicting changes may not occur in adjacent lines.
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The next (and inadequate) solution is to order the XML consistently - you can do this in your diff tool, or you can write your tools to produce a reliably ordered file in the first place.
Many tools that work on XML files exhibit what I call "juggling" - the elements and attributes change order when you change the value of them or their siblings, because the software is directly using the DOM to manipulate the file - and does this by creating new objects and removing the old ones from the collection. This is a real PITA for text-based diff tools because not all the changes will even conflict with each other (element sequences are often spread across multiple lines, more so if you put attributes on their own line to enhance the ability to merge).
So, you can either write your code to write a consistent order - usually by serializing a fresh XML stream from a model when you write the file.
Or you can add a layer that re-orders the document when you diff it - many of the available diff tools will let you do this. For some files, I used to write an XSLT sheet (to re-order elements consistently). For attributes, I wrote an extra option for Tidy that sorts attributes - doing that plus laying them out on separate lines is sufficient for many files. I've gone as far as writing custom tools that unpack HTML written into an attribute (with all the escape sequences that entails) into a CDATA section for clarity, runs it through Tidy, and then repacks everything after you're done.
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Intermediate : I've thought of taking this a step further and converting the XML to a directory tree of text files designed to merge well, principally to make things clearer for end-users who currently have the kind of diff-tool-plus-converter described above but still occasionally make merge errors.
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The next step is to write tools to specifically diff your model. This is probably a bridge too far for most developers, because we have the kind of brain that can abstract a text representation of the model and map it to the actual model that will be created. For end users, it may well be advisable.
Diff / merge tools are a field that need more work - currently the main users are developers who can cope with them being a bit immature. But we will increasingly see collaborative tools based on the kinds of version control that we take for granted, and normal users will need to be able to do this stuff too.
> copy and paste from your other code?
If you worked for me, "sexconker", you would be FIRED right now.
Dafuq?
"At my current job, we use Visual Studio to write web services in C#. The experience has shocked me."
What is wrong with it, or more likely: what are you doing wrong?
"the 260-character limit of path & file names"
That's a filesystem limitation, not a VS issue. But what on earth are you doing that requires anything that long in a Web Service? Are we talking old SOAP web services or modern REST/Web API services?
I use it for C#/MVC/WebAPI(REST) business apps. No node.js or python at work, although I do play with it outside of my work tasks.
Yes, if you're still using VS2010 I bet you're running into some issues.
One thing you might try is to make a \Code or \Source directory and move your projects there, rather than in \My Docs\VS\Projects - that does add a lot of unnecessary characters to the path name.
Very glad I'm working for a company that doesn't sit on it's hands with Visual Studio. Already have VS2015 installed on my work machine and I'm cleared to use it as soon as I get one our proprietary add-ins rewritten as a VSPackage extension. (They just nuked the old-school Add-Ins support in VS2015.)