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Visual Studio 2013 released to web

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Re: Visual Studio 2013 released to web

#71

Post by anton_gogolev »

breischl wrote: post #63
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.

Wait, weren't you complaining about all the "wizard clickety clicky" things in another thread? If you hate wizards, and you hate "obscure incantations", which I'm assuming means code, then what do you like? Do you program in natural language with voice recognition?

Where's the conflict?

By "obscure incantations" I mean having _three_ different syntaxes for string interpolation/variable substitution, providing _six_ command line arguments for the tool so that it does the one reasonable thing, having illogical rules in comparison operators, having to use a frickin' _bootstrapper_ to install prerequisites and not being able to chain MSIs, not being able to have a single installer for x86 and x64, not having a _simple_ way to define logic for "Back" button, yet having to write heavily nested XML to do simplest thing.

Re: Visual Studio 2013 released to web

#72

Post by mynameisvlad »

saejox wrote: post #64

"Please install Internet Explorer 10 and then retry installing Visual Studio" Internet Explorer 10 also insists on Windows 7 SP1 installation. I'm using this Win7 install since 2009. I'm very scared the update will jinx it.

That's such a horrible practice I don't even.

You're forcing yourself to stay on an older, potentially less maintained version of the OS so you don't "jinx it"?

Re: Visual Studio 2013 released to web

#74

Post by jameshart »

anton_gogolev wrote: post #42
archon wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> pander to web monkeys Really? How exactly does VS2012 pander to "web monkeys" at the expense of others?

It's not necessarily "monkeys", but, disturbingly, Microsoft developer tools are becoming more and more oriented towards "wizard-and-designer-clickety-clickery" type development. There are a few exceptions to this rule (think EF Code-First), but that's a drop in the ocean.

The powershell prompt to manage your nuget package dependencies on a project is pretty much the opposite of 'clickety' development. The F# interactive prompt, likewise.

MS have always done a good job of catering to a wide range of developer personas.

Re: Visual Studio 2013 released to web

#75

Post by moron4hire »

anton_gogolev wrote: post #34
acqq wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That's "MSDN Magazine Camp". MSDN Magazine was a rag of a publication that was mostly just advertisements for 3rd party tools than it was anything interesting about programming. MSDN is the Microsoft Developer's Network, which houses basically all of their documentation, tutorials, articles, and support for developers.

Re: Visual Studio 2013 released to web

#76

Post by sk5t »

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...

IMHO the killer feature with VS 2012 is C# 5 and await/async. It takes a good afternoon to get your head around it but is totally worth it (unless you develop CPU-bound web applications exclusively, I suppose).

Re: Visual Studio 2013 released to web

#78

Post by sk5t »

lucisferre wrote: post #52
anton_gogolev wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not necessarily "monkeys", but, disturbingly, Microsoft developer tools are becoming more and more oriented towards "wizard-and-designer-clickety-clickery" type development. There are a few exceptions to this rule (think EF Code-First), but that's a drop in the ocean.

If anything MS tools have moved away from clickety-clickery. That was something they were pretty much famous for back in 2008. MVC and EF are just a couple examples of moving away from this patter. This is nothing but imaginative revisionism. Don't get me wrong, this type of thing drove me from the MS ecosystem a while ago now but they do move largely in the right direction, just too slowly for my tastes.

Agreed - EF code-first, Nuget, and ASP.NET MVC in general are excellent steps in the right direction away from excessively tool-oriented / ultra-bundled / abstracty type things. The very dark days were pure ASP.NET web forms with controls, DataSets, DataTables, ClientScriptBlocks, and the like.

A lot of things in VS are wrappers around very well-documented CLI tools, e.g., svcutil, and I don't begrudge these tools for doing a lot of heavy lifting.

Re: Visual Studio 2013 released to web

#79

Post by MichaelGG »

Leszek wrote: post #57
acqq wrote: post #53

In VS 2012 MSFT removed the color for the icons in the UI. Everybody complained on the web. Now the color icons are back. MSFT's spin: "Visual Studio 2013 includes many user interface improvements based on customer feedback and Microsoft’s core design principle of keeping the focus on the content to deliver an improved user experience. You may notice the more than 400 modified icons with greater differentiation and i…

> based on customer feedback Sounds about right to me. Why is this "spin"?

Because from the very beginning, way before 2012 was released, customers hated the move and criticized it. Microsoft insisted "Metro" was cool and we had to like it, that they weren't icons, but glyphs, and glyphs don't use color.

Instead of just admitting up-front their redesign was pretty hated and promising to fix it, they insist it's great until they've changed it.

Re: Visual Studio 2013 released to web

#80

Post by rockin »

powertower wrote: post #43
coffeeaddicted wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So how would one deal with projects that contain 1000s of files? Run a script to enumerate the files and populate a wix file? Zip up the different parts and have the installation process unzip them?

That's exactly how we did it. Our wix files where 90% created automatically by a script
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