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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.
Actually the strategy is go get rid of "patch Tuesday" Now your systems will get hosed like uhm, whenever.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
Oh really?
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Another version of .NET means update times get increased again. Christ all fucking mighty, Windows has become a dog.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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/
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.
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. :)
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 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.
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.
If we look at the table from late last year, C++11 support seems quite well-rounded. If there's a bug, file a report.
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.
Hmmm, I threw down $400 on a Nokia 830 (Windows 8.1) several months ago and don't regret my purchase. You can stick to your iPhone you stupid weenie.