Visual Studio 2013 released to web • Hacker News Board

Re: Visual Studio 2013 released to web

#31

Post by Pxtl » Thu, Oct 17, 2013, 1:39 PM UTC

daigoba66 wrote: post #17

Pxtl wrote: post #12

VS2012 took out installer projects (instead telling you to just use InstallShield), SQLCLR projects, was incompatible with Oleg Sych's T4 Toolbox plug-in, and had a colour-scheme in the TFS source browser that made my eyes want to bleed. Every other VS upgrade has been comparatively painless. I can't say I'm excited to try VS2013.

For installers, use http://wixtoolset.org/ .

While that's obviously a solution, it's not quite the same y'know? There's a lot more skill overhead in learning that tool vs the comparative ease of the installer project.

Considering how thoroughly MS screwed the pooch on ClickOnce, I was genuinely surprised when they completely abandoned their working installer system.

Re: Visual Studio 2013 released to web

#32

Post by anton_gogolev » Thu, Oct 17, 2013, 1:39 PM UTC

roel_v wrote: post #24

anton_gogolev wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, because I really want to spend hours upon hours studying obscure incantations that someone decided to be making sense. WiX (and MSI, for that matter) is a disaster.

The same can be said of programming in general. It's true that msi is different from other installer builders, but it's for a reason. And if you have a concrete project you can build while following along with the wix tutorials and book, it's not difficult, it just takes some time.

Yeah, the "reason" being that Windows Installer was designed to support corporate deployment of applications to shared machines with install-on-demand and roaming profiles, and to support Windows 95 and up. This, and Microsoft's manic affection to backwards compatibility plus "architecture astronautery" (on-demand installs of COM objects, anyone) makes MSI a disaster.

The fault of WiX is that it's too thin of a wrapper.

Re: Visual Studio 2013 released to web

#33

Post by xradionut » Thu, Oct 17, 2013, 1:39 PM UTC

VS 2010 is the last one I got for personal use. Not enamored with the changes in VS 2012, Windows 8.* nor the cyclical abandonment of APIs. Add in the increased license cost we face on all Microsoft products at work and any announcement from Redmond gets a "meh" from me.

Re: Visual Studio 2013 released to web

#34

Post by anton_gogolev » Thu, Oct 17, 2013, 1:41 PM UTC

acqq wrote: post #26

chillitom wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Man! If you're doing C++ then you definitely want to get onto 2012/2013 ASAP, the improvements in tooling are amazing. "Navigate to.." alone is worth it.

VS 2008 is the last one capable to compile the C++ to produce the binaries that can run on Windows 2000. Believe or not, I actually need that. That prevents me to use any C++ language changes introduced after VS 2008. The frustrating part is that MS actually removed the existing code from the already existing libraries (but which are not binary interchangeable between the compiler versions) in order to disable the su…

"MSDN Camp"[1] in its full glory.

[1]: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html

Re: Visual Studio 2013 released to web

#35

Post by gecko » Thu, Oct 17, 2013, 1:44 PM UTC

xradionut wrote: post #33

VS 2010 is the last one I got for personal use. Not enamored with the changes in VS 2012, Windows 8.* nor the cyclical abandonment of APIs. Add in the increased license cost we face on all Microsoft products at work and any announcement from Redmond gets a "meh" from me.

VS 2013 adds fix-and-continue to x64 builds. That right there is enough for me.

Beyond that, though, I'd encourage you to at least look at VS 2012, get past the superficial changes, and look underneath. There were a lot of performance improvements in the GUI rendering that added up, and there were a lot of tweaks to project search and management that became indispensable to me shortly after launch.

Re: Visual Studio 2013 released to web

#36

Post by gecko » Thu, Oct 17, 2013, 1:45 PM UTC

Pxtl wrote: post #31

daigoba66 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For installers, use http://wixtoolset.org/ .

While that's obviously a solution, it's not quite the same y'know? There's a lot more skill overhead in learning that tool vs the comparative ease of the installer project. Considering how thoroughly MS screwed the pooch on ClickOnce, I was genuinely surprised when they completely abandoned their working installer system.

What's wrong with ClickOnce? I've not used it from a developer's perspective, but Chrome's installation (which uses it) always seems smooth as butter.

Re: Visual Studio 2013 released to web

#37

Post by jonnii » Thu, Oct 17, 2013, 1:48 PM UTC

Pxtl wrote: post #12

VS2012 took out installer projects (instead telling you to just use InstallShield), SQLCLR projects, was incompatible with Oleg Sych's T4 Toolbox plug-in, and had a colour-scheme in the TFS source browser that made my eyes want to bleed. Every other VS upgrade has been comparatively painless. I can't say I'm excited to try VS2013.

Or maybe try Shimmer?

https://github.com/github/Shimmer

Re: Visual Studio 2013 released to web

#38

Post by euroclydon » Thu, Oct 17, 2013, 1:50 PM UTC

coffeeaddicted wrote: post #28

DrJokepu wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s really not that bad. WiX is actually pretty decent, definitely not a “disaster”. It might look more frightening than InstallShield because you don’t get a nice UI that allows you to set up an installer with a few clicks, but I mean, we’re programmers here, surely editing textual configuration files is not an issue? It took me somethong like 30 minutes to replace our old InstallShield installer with WiX.

I gave it a shot for a day recently but found it way harder to use than InstallShield or NSIS. Part of it was probably the broken documentation where half the links just ended in nirvana. But I gave up when I learned you really have to add each single file one-by-one and the documentation even defended this as a feature.

You can use this Wix tool or command called Heat, which will automate the adding (and creating GUIDs) for a bunch of files. Really it's the underlying MSI target that's so painful, especially when you get into versioning. The OS wants to have detailed information on every file that is part of your installation. I think this is primarily for uninstallation purposes, but also for upgrades and who know what else. If I could get away with it, I'd just use NullSoft. It's like writing assembly, but it's so much simpler.

With Wix/MSI, there were certain executables that I could never get it to run as part of the install process. The XML would look the same as other execute commands that worked, but I could never figure out why they didn't run.

Re: Visual Studio 2013 released to web

#39

Post by Kronopath » Thu, Oct 17, 2013, 1:51 PM UTC

kossmoboleat wrote: post #3

scrabble wrote: post #2

I'm still using VS 2010 at work. Can't seem to make a compelling case to upgrade for the cost, and it's just getting more frustrating. VS 2013 is looking like a really great product, especially in comparison to VS 2010.

VS 2008 here, somebody apparently tested 2012 but nothing came out of it with people fearing that a different C++ compiler will break everything...

I'm still on VS 2008 as well. Is there anyone who has upgraded a substantially sized C++ project from VS 2008 to one of the newer versions that would be willing to share their experiences?

Re: Visual Studio 2013 released to web

#40

Post by jonnii » Thu, Oct 17, 2013, 1:52 PM UTC

gecko wrote: post #36

Pxtl wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While that's obviously a solution, it's not quite the same y'know? There's a lot more skill overhead in learning that tool vs the comparative ease of the installer project. Considering how thoroughly MS screwed the pooch on ClickOnce, I was genuinely surprised when they completely abandoned their working installer system.

What's wrong with ClickOnce? I've not used it from a developer's perspective, but Chrome's installation (which uses it) always seems smooth as butter.

There's a lot of things wrong with ClickOnce. IIRC chrome's installer only uses clickonce as a bootstrapping mechanism for the _actual_ installer.

Problems:

* Can't choose installation path * No offline installation * Hard (impossible?) to use with a CDN.

Here's an example of how to turn a directory of precompiled binaries into a click once package using powershell:

https://gist.github.com/jonnii/2628150

My powershell isn't _great_, so forgive any powershell oddities, but notice how much you have to massage the output of the mage tools to actually get it to do what you want.