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Visual Studio '11' Announced

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Re: Visual Studio '11' Announced

#171
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

A typical session looks like this [1]. With the documentation window open, it looks like this [2]. The GUI designer looks like this [3] (there's also a second "designer" for Qt Quick). The debugger looks like this [4]. With the compile log/error log/search results window open, it looks like this [5]. About 80% of the time, when I use Qt Creator, especially if I'm not developing a GUI application (in which case I also use the designer), my screen looks like [1].

On the other hand, to my eyes at least, most other IDE's look something like this [6], [7] or very very extreme cases [8]. That is, they lose a lot of vertical space to tool bars.

When I'm developing on Linux and I'm not developing a Qt GUI application in C++, I use a mixture of text-mode vim, geany and gedit in a tiling window manager (that is, the "dock windows" in most IDEs are windows that I have tiled, or vim panels) with no window borders or decorations whatsoever [9].

[1] http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4d/QtCreator...

[2] http://www.developer.nokia.com/Resources/Library/Porting_to_...

[3] http://linux.leunen.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/qtcreator...

[4] http://lists.qt.nokia.com/pipermail/qt-creator/attachments/2...

[5] http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-teVIBJ45OEU/Twbi9_wQd_I/AAAAAAAAAY...

[6] http://www.eclipse.org/screenshots/images/SDK-RedFlag_Linux....

[7] http://www.hanselman.com/blog/content/binary/WindowsLiveWrit...

[8] http://swtswing.sourceforge.net/screenshots/images/EclipseMe...

[9] Not my screenshot, but similar: http://static.milkbox.net/ss/ss-2009-05-06.png

Re: Visual Studio '11' Announced

#172
post #138
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.

I've dumped all extensions - I had R# and VisualSVN. The solution does have about 80,000 files though.

Maybe VS crashing is the symptom, and you should look for the cause around the fact that your solution has 80,000 files within it?

Re: Visual Studio '11' Announced

#173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 utt…

Dunno about 03 but I recently installed Office XP (2002) almost without pb on a Windows 7 64bits. The only pb was with the companion help API that doesn't exist anymore on Vista/7 but is downloadable as a hotfix from Microsoft. So I'm perplex about the need of a VM to run Excel 03 and won't debate about the use of it to generate code as anyone have different habits for his workflow.

"pb" means "problem"?

Re: Visual Studio '11' Announced

#174

I'm sorry, but I use color to locate things. This, to me, is a disaster. If this isn't a problem for other people, fine, but it's a problem to me. A better solution would have been to use less color and desaturated tones rather than simply going to full on black and white, which serves only to rob the IDE of potential visual cues. This is like using a cannon to kill a bird. Just because they overcolorized VS2010 for…

I wonder if Microsoft isn't doing this as a subtle way to get developers mindset away from "old style" window's applications and into a Metro mindset.

I doubt it, it's just a redesign by people who aren't very good. Metro, otoh, looks good.

Even the blue they've chosen conflicts with the gray.

It just looks shit.

Re: Visual Studio '11' Announced

#175
post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not "insane", XP is three years past the end of official support and only two years until the end of extended support. It's two generations old and possibly three by the time this is released. http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/products/lifecycl... XP doesn't run IE9 either, and it came out ages ago. XP is old now.

I know you mean to point out how old and crufty XP is (and that is true), but if you stop and think about it... it's really a testament to C++ and Microsoft engineering that it has done so well for so long.

Well that, and

* the long gap between XP and Vista

* that it was still selling on new netbooks until quite recently, and

* the leveling off of CPU performance.

Re: Visual Studio '11' Announced

#176

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…

I personally think that Microsoft should stick with things that only Microsoft can do , and leave the more cutting-edge innovations to others. Example: the test automation tools into Visual Studio were terrible. Maybe they still are, I don't know, I've stopped using them. nUnit is just better. Their automated refactoring stuff may be OK, but the stuff from JetBrains is much, much better. Don't get me started on Team…

> I personally think that Microsoft should stick with things that only Microsoft can do

I'm very curious to see that list...

Re: Visual Studio '11' Announced

#177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speed is fine here and I generally enjoy working with VS 10 when I'm on Windows (showing errors while typing is a fantastic feature which I haven's seen for c++ before VS10). But my annoying VS 10 bug is that approximately once per week it simply refuses rebuilding a changed c++ file until I clean and rebuild the whole project. It just continues using the old object file despite having c++ files with a newer date - a…

Try adding a semicolon in your source files immediately after your includes: #include "stdio.h" #include "system.h" ; int StartOfYourCPPCode() { There's a long-standing bug with pre-compiled headers and code regeneration that (apparently) Microsoft has never fixed. There were (still are?) so many obscure issues with PCH that I just disabled it altogether.

Thanks. We also had suspected pre-compiled headers and also just disabled them completely, but unfortunately that wasn't it. I'll try adding a semicolon next time it happens to check if that changes something.

Re: Visual Studio '11' Announced

#178

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…

> We are still typing a lot of boring cruft

This is more due to a language/API design flaw, actually. When a program (a preprocessor, a part of the IDE) generates more code starting from the code you actually wrote, it's because, for some reason, whatever you expressed in your code could not express enough to build the whole application.

Re: Visual Studio '11' Announced

#179

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…

> We are still typing a lot of boring cruft

This is more due to a language/API design flaw, actually. When a program (a preprocessor, a part of the IDE) generates more code starting from the code you actually wrote, it's because, for some reason, whatever you expressed in your code could not express enough to build the whole application.

Re: Visual Studio '11' Announced

#180

I like the new style. It makes me nostalgic for NeXT and AmigaOS 2.0 UI. I just hope it crashes less and is faster than VS2010. Also, it looks like yet another release that neglects C++ users.

I'd gladly exchange color for more pixels most of the time.
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