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Visual Studio '11' Announced

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Re: Visual Studio '11' Announced

#81

Post by dmethvin »

RandallBrown wrote: post #73
AshleysBrain wrote: post #59

Developers beware: Visual C++ 11 cannot compile executables that work on Windows XP at all: https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/details/... C++ devs may want to skip this release and just go for Visual C++ 12 when it's out, since by then hopefully XP will be ignorable.

I'm afraid XP won't be ignorable for another 3 or 4 years at least.

Microsoft stops providing XP security patches in April 2014. Any organization that wants to use XP after that will need to pay Microsoft to maintain support. Any organization that continues to use XP without support is irresponsible.

Re: Visual Studio '11' Announced

#83

Post by huhtenberg »

I might be an old fart (close to 20 years of Windows programming), but all I see is bloat. A compiler, a linker, a debugger. An editor with syntax highlighting, Ctrl-F and Ctrl-H. That's it, this is pretty much all that I ever use in VS. Even plausibly useful features like Intellisense and IDE macros end up being more of a hindrance than a help.

What am I missing? What is there in the remaining 80% of VS that I am not using that is of practical value? Serious question.

Re: Visual Studio '11' Announced

#84

Post by algoshift »

oleganza wrote: post #78
algoshift wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why not experiment and try to be better at what you do? Herein lies the problem. The term "better" is most definitely subjective. Not to pic on Xcode, but this is a prime example of focusing too much on making a consumer appliance rather than a professional tool. Like I said: I don't want iTunes, I want a kick-ass IDE. I'm in the middle of a project that has, quite literally, thousands of assets to manage (images,…

The key was "try". Xcode is far from being focused on "consumers" and they are trying hard to make a kick-ass IDE. It could be a different definition of "kick-ass" from yours, that's fine. Anyway, I emphasize this again: it's not a question if the actual result is better or worse, it's a complex question because there are thousands of people to evaluate it. The question is why not to experiment more where you have mo…

>It's hard to experiment with a toolbar in Excel because millions of non-computer-geek users

Excel is another of my favorite "Why did they do that?" examples. In my opinion, MS absolutely ruined Excel somewhere in the transition from Office 2003 to 2007. If you were a power user with Excel'03 you felt like a total idiot with Excel'07. And, this wasn't a matter of a few buttons here and there. The thing was almost utterly unusable compared to what you could do with the '03 version. Furthermore, they complicated the usage of VBA modules. If you had a library of VBA work that you used regularly you, all of a sudden, found yourself scratching your head trying to figure out how to do some pretty basic stuff.

I use Excel extensively for automated code generation. Simple examples are the generation of repetitive lookup table code in various languages. Or code to pre-stuff database tables. Or maintaining a complex LUT-driven state machine. I have custom Excel tools that have taken months to develop that do increase productivity in a measurable way. For example, one tool uses Excel to auto-magically write the code (LUT, callbacks, etc.) for a menu system on an embedded device with an LCD display. Before the tool it'd take hours, if not a couple of days, to maintain. After the custom VBA tool it was a matter of minutes.

Anyhow, upon switching to '07 (mostly a forced switch because I needed to migrate to a 64 bit OS for Finite Element Analysis work) I went from light speed to crawling. That, to me, is not an improvement. I am OK with learning new things, you have to be open to it if you want to remain in this game, but sometimes you can't help but scratch your head and try to figure out what the hell they were thinking.

Thankfully that was easily solved with a VM running XP and Excel'03.

Re: Visual Studio '11' Announced

#85

Post by cjensen »

huhtenberg wrote: post #82
yarone wrote: post #80

Still using a floppy disk to represent "save". Wondering when will this end...

But what would you replace it with that is equally easy to recognize?

Does anyone really use "save" so infrequently that they have not memorized the keyboard shortcut? There's a reason no apps on OS X have save icons...

Re: Visual Studio '11' Announced

#86

Post by ajross »

dkersten wrote: post #44
ajross wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of us grognards would argue that if you're having trouble finding buttons, they really shouldn't be on the screen at all. Seriously, why must IDEs look like this? Why is there screen space dedicated to documentation when I'm not reading docs? Why are there multiple horizontal bars at both the top and bottom of the full-screen display when the single most important activity in the app is scanning very long text f…

why must IDEs look like this? Qt Creator is currently my favourite IDE to develop C++ in (even if it does not use Qt) and it doesn't look like this.

I've used Qt Creator only once or twice, but my memory (and the handful of screenshots I see on google image search) is that it's pretty much the same. An editor rectangle embedded in a bunch of other crap with way too much vertical space above and below it dedicated to things that aren't very important.

For reference, my emacs window has the gnome 3 panel and the window manager title bar as waste and that's it. And for years I ran a custom metacity theme which turned off the title bars entirely (haven't managed to port that to gnome shell yet).

Re: Visual Studio '11' Announced

#87

Post by joshuacc »

kprobst wrote: post #57
pkamb wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But why is it the default? Why not match the existing tab behavior of every web browser?

Actually both IE and Firefox now (I think) insert tabs to the left. I don't know why it became a 'thing' at some point, I dislike it enormously as well.

I just tested this, and both IE9 and FF10 insert new tabs to the right in Windows 7.

Re: Visual Studio '11' Announced

#88

Post by cageface »

oleganza wrote: post #20

Interesting thing about VS and Xcode is that they do not really try to compete with somebody or fight for attention. Both Windows and Mac/iOS developers would use less useful tools if they still let them make products for the popular platforms. JetBrains, Borland and others are fighting for attention and developers' love. They must try really-really hard to make people choose an alternative to the official tools. So…

Many changes in Xcode 4 seem to have been made entirely for cosmetic reasons. The default error list pane on the left hand side, for instance, cuts off 80% of the error message text. Jetbrains' AppCode UI may not look as much like an iTunes clone but it seems to have been designed with developer productivity as top priority.

Re: Visual Studio '11' Announced

#89

Post by cageface »

maximilianburke wrote: post #74
oleganza wrote: post #20

Interesting thing about VS and Xcode is that they do not really try to compete with somebody or fight for attention. Both Windows and Mac/iOS developers would use less useful tools if they still let them make products for the popular platforms. JetBrains, Borland and others are fighting for attention and developers' love. They must try really-really hard to make people choose an alternative to the official tools. So…

XCode 4 may have been designed but it wasn't designed well. It has no mixed source/disassembly views. Hovering over the debug icons say that pressing control and clicking "step into" will step a single instruction. But this isn't a sticky setting, so if I press control and click "step into" twice, the first time will step an instruction and the second will perform a source line step. It also crashes. A lot. When doin…

Try Jetbrains AppCode. It's the best $99 any serious Mac or iOS developer can spend.

Re: Visual Studio '11' Announced

#90

Post by MartinCron »

brunomlopes wrote: post #79
elemeno wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd second that. In the past five years (or at least since VS 2008), I can remember VS crashing on me maybe half a dozen times. That's with spending most of my time working on pretty large multi language projects. For context, I don't use any extensions other than (sometimes) ReSharper and Tortoise svn/git/hg.

Mine doesn't crash on Web projects, but can't work for a couple of hours on a Windows Phone 7 project without it going boom . I think most of it works fine and dandy, but some parts can be quite sensitive.

Fair enough, I haven't worked on any Windows Phone 7 stuff yet, so it may be fatally brittle there.
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