Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Visual Studio 2017 Release Candidate

visualstudio.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 121 posts

Re: Visual Studio 2017 Release Candidate

#111

Post by int_19h »

billforsternz wrote: post #61
cptskippy wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's some sick bastard in Microsoft who really likes these confusing sames. He's probably the same guy who came up with .NET. Remember when .NET could refer to virtually every product Microsoft made? I was half expecting them to call it Visual Studio Surface. Then you could run Surface on your Surface on any Surface on the planet.

Indeed, .NET must be the worst, most misleading, least googleable product name ever. I suppose we should be grateful that MS called an earliest technology COM not .COM.

It could have been worse. The original internal name for .NET before the rebranding was COM+ 2.0, if I remember correctly. You can still see some legacy of that in names like COMPLUS_ZAPDISABLE (an environment variable that disables loading of ngen'd assemblies by the CLR).

Somewhat more indirectly, it also surfaced in low-level native APIs used to host CLR inside an app, with names like ICorRuntimeHost - if I remember correctly, COR here stands for Common Object Runtime. Also seen in mscorlib.dll (the assembly containing the most fundamental types, which is the top node in any CLI assembly dependency graph) and mscoree.dll (EE = execution engine).

Oh, and C# was COOL (C-like Object-Oriented Language).

Re: Visual Studio 2017 Release Candidate

#112

Post by int_19h »

erikbye wrote: post #96
billforsternz wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, .NET must be the worst, most misleading, least googleable product name ever. I suppose we should be grateful that MS called an earliest technology COM not .COM.

The first result I get googling for ".net" is the Wikipedia article ".NET Framework". The first result I get for "COM" (or "com") is Microsoft's page on "COM: Component Object Model Technologies". Honestly, I have never had a problem googling .NET and COM-related stuff.

This is after it became popular, and Google (I assume) just special-cased it. Back when it first came out, though, typing that into any search engine we had back then would mostly just give you tons of domain names that end with ".net".

Then also, we had Office .NET, Visual Studio .NET (with Visual Studio .NET 2003 added later), and pre-release versions of what was to ship asWindows Server 2003 were known as Windows .NET Server for a while.

Web services (the SOAP and XML kind) were the next big thing back then, at least as far as Microsoft was concerned, and so the entire software stack was promoted as conceptually centered around that - hence the .NET name. Kinda ironic, what with the rise of cloud computing later, when .NET brand was already toned down to refer to the framework specifically, and the consequent need to invent "Azure".

Re: Visual Studio 2017 Release Candidate

#113

Post by int_19h »

nathanaldensr wrote: post #42
tracker1 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That went away a while ago, unfortunately... though I think yaml may have been better, the json-like structure was much easier than the xml mess for vs projects. Hoping they added an "empty" project that is just files, closest were some of the web projects, but even then, node projects always felt like an alien afterthought... haven't seen how they are in vs2017, guessing they brought in the ntvs stuff into mainline.

From what I've read, Microsoft decided to reintroduce MSBuild as their unified build platform. This includes good ol' csproj and sln files, with a caveat that the actual contents of those files have been greatly simplified. It's still XML.

SLN files aren't really MSBuild (it can read them, but for any sort of build automation, you're going to be better off with a .proj file referencing all your actual projects).

Re: Visual Studio 2017 Release Candidate

#114

Post by erikbye »

int_19h wrote: post #112
erikbye wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first result I get googling for ".net" is the Wikipedia article ".NET Framework". The first result I get for "COM" (or "com") is Microsoft's page on "COM: Component Object Model Technologies". Honestly, I have never had a problem googling .NET and COM-related stuff.

This is after it became popular, and Google (I assume) just special-cased it. Back when it first came out, though, typing that into any search engine we had back then would mostly just give you tons of domain names that end with ".net". Then also, we had Office .NET, Visual Studio .NET (with Visual Studio .NET 2003 added later), and pre-release versions of what was to ship asWindows Server 2003 were known as Windows…

Back then I just used MSDN.

Re: Visual Studio 2017 Release Candidate

#116

Post by 72deluxe »

cptskippy wrote: post #59
douche wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The naming has been awful with this release in particular. Having two Visual Studio (20)15s out at the same time is very confusing. Almost as bad as the Skype vs Skype for Business marketing boondoggle.

There's some sick bastard in Microsoft who really likes these confusing sames. He's probably the same guy who came up with .NET. Remember when .NET could refer to virtually every product Microsoft made? I was half expecting them to call it Visual Studio Surface. Then you could run Surface on your Surface on any Surface on the planet.

Ah yes Office .Net.

Such confusion. They then went and tagged "Live" on everything.

Re: Visual Studio 2017 Release Candidate

#117

Post by WorldMaker »

WorldMaker wrote: post #70
hudo wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

project.json is still official way of configuring the projects. Dotnet cli uses that, msbuild is not there yet i think. Empty project is done with "donnet new", and it's really small and light ...

Recent versions of the dotnet cli work with both xproj and project.json for the time being, but have defaulted `dotnet new` to the xproj output. It also provides a `dotnet migrate` command to convert a project.json to an xproj.

xproj was the transitionary MSBuild scaffold, I meant csproj, things are returning to the csproj extension.

Some details of it all: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dotnet/2016/11/16/announcin...

Re: Visual Studio 2017 Release Candidate

#118

Post by vram22 »

mynameisvlad wrote: post #101
vram22 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many software packages have poor or confusing version numbering. Java, IIRC, jumped from Java 1.2 to 2 or 1.4 to 4 or something like that. Windows 3.1 to 95 to 98 to Me to NT (stood for New Technology, ha ha [1]) to 2000 to XP to Vista to 7 to 8 to 10 ... (might have got some of the order wrong there). [1] New, as in the classic marketing/advertising phrase "new and improved", maybe ... :)

NT was called "New Technology" literally because it was a new technology. It was based on the NT kernel (which is used now) as opposed to the 9x/MS-DOS kernels used in 1.0-Me. Also, NT came before 95. Specifically, as Windows NT 3.1.

>NT was called "New Technology" literally because it was a new technology. It was based on the NT kernel (which is used now) as opposed to the 9x/MS-DOS kernels used in 1.0-Me.

Thanks; I was aware of that when I wrote my comment that you replied to. I was around in tech when NT was released, so I had read the expansion of the acronym then in the media. In fact I had read the book Inside Windows NT (the one by Helen Custer, a good one) some time after it came out. Remember it talking about Dave Cutler as the main NT architect, his DEC VMS background, etc. And it had a fair amount of interesting content about NT internals. Also remember trying this Linux C utility that I wrote, selpg (which I posted about in this other recent HN thread - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12960242), on Win NT, because I had read that it had a POSIX subsystem (then and for a while). And it worked on it, including the POSIX popen() call (though not to an lp command, since NT didn't have a UNIX-like lp subsystem). My point in mentioning marketing was that even if Windows NT really was new technology (and it was), giving the name "New Technology" was somewhat unusual (after all, any non-trivial product upgrade is usually new tech, unless only cosmetic) , and so I thought it might have been the marketing folks's decision. And we know that marketing people do sometimes push product names for marketing reasons, that tech people might not always agree with. That's all there was to it.

>Also, NT came before 95. Specifically, as Windows NT 3.1.

I did clearly say above:

"(might have got some of the order wrong there)."

Re: Visual Studio 2017 Release Candidate

#119

Post by cptskippy »

douche wrote: post #69
cptskippy wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's some sick bastard in Microsoft who really likes these confusing sames. He's probably the same guy who came up with .NET. Remember when .NET could refer to virtually every product Microsoft made? I was half expecting them to call it Visual Studio Surface. Then you could run Surface on your Surface on any Surface on the planet.

> confusing sames I can't tell if that's a typo or intentional. I might start calling them that.

I am at my cleverest when it's completely by accident.

Re: Visual Studio 2017 Release Candidate

#120

Post by collinmanderson »

gregmac wrote: post #65
b_lindahl wrote: post #38

Visual Studio "15" = Visual Studio 2017 = VC 15.0 Crystal clear. Why didn't Microsoft bump up VC version to 17 to sort of make VC version follow VS version. Would clear out some confusion going forward.

I am beginning to think that Microsoft's bad verison naming is entirely on-purpose. Windows has had terrible naming since NT -- back and forth between names/numbers/years (or nonsense like "Anniversary Update" or "R2"), have a completely different scheme for Server vs Desktop, and if you look at the corresponding kernel versions of these releases[0], the major/minor bump in versions seems completely arbitrary. .NET i…

Windows 2000 = 5 Windows XP = 5.1 Windows Vista = 6.0 Windows 7 = 6.1 Windows 8 = 6.2 Finally, they have Windows 10 == 10
Post reply on HN