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Visual Studio 2013 released to web

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Re: Visual Studio 2013 released to web

#121
post #95

This rant has been brewing for many years... Everything's been downhill since VS6. I'm only joking, but seriously, does anyone remember how lightning fast VS6 was? That was over 15 years ago with much slower computers. I guess application 'snappiness' has not been a priority for the Visual Studio decision makers. I've used VS since the late 90s (writing node.js in ST2 now) and honestly appreciate the hard work and co…

I disagree heavily. Stock VS is very fast. However it does slow down significantly when using a plugin like ReSharper. But for me in the end it is worth it. Show me any text editor or IDE that provides the same number and quality of productivity enhancing features as ReSharper that isn't as slow or slower.

Not worth it for me. I have a very fast system (i7, 32GB, RAID 0 SSD), and ReSharper slows everything down too much to be usable. I'm not sure if it's the projects I work on -- I've used it usually on pretty large ones like Orchard CMS so that might be part of it.

Re: Visual Studio 2013 released to web

#122
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft developer tools are becoming more and more oriented towards "wizard-and-designer-clickety-clickery" type development. Maybe you are just now noticing, but MS dev tools have always had wizard clicky things. For example, see the original Visual Basics from the 90s.

AFAIK, Visual Basic was targeted at non-professional/beginner programmers, so having wizards and designers is fine there. My main gripe with abundance of today's "visual programming" is that we have memory-managed languages with immense expressive power and ability to write all kinds of DSLs, yet what Microsoft does is it provides crippled XML-backed designers along with half-baked frameworks and class libraries.

I've used VS for a few years, and have NEVER used any of the "visual programming" stuff.

Re: Visual Studio 2013 released to web

#123
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the problem here is that VS needs to satisfy the needs of many different types of developers and also try to appeal each ones personal preferences. Personally I am enjoying VS2012 a lot and it is really sad that there are hardly other IDEs this good.

> I think the problem here is that VS needs to satisfy the needs of many different types of developers No, it does not need to. Someone decided that it needs to pander to web monkeys instead of empowering users that have used VS for 10+ years.

FWIW, I can build an app in html5/javascript for every major desktop and mobile platform that runs "natively" on the host OS.

Re: Visual Studio 2013 released to web

#124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the problem here is that VS needs to satisfy the needs of many different types of developers and also try to appeal each ones personal preferences. Personally I am enjoying VS2012 a lot and it is really sad that there are hardly other IDEs this good.

I completely agree. I've gone through plenty of good IDE's in the last year. From Dreamweaver, to Text Mate, to Komodo, to Aptana. I started using VS when I landed in a .Net shop and it made sense to use it. Totally blown away by some of the cooler features you can't find on any other IDE. Even the free VS Express (which I now use at home) is so much better than other IDE's out there.

What features does VS2012 have for .NET (IDE features, not platform features) that don't have direct analogues in IDEA?

For C++, I find VS rather lacking compared to Xcode (though that's a combination of the compiler being dumb and IntelliSense being poor).

Re: Visual Studio 2013 released to web

#125

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.

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.

He's not wrong: WiX is a horrorshow. It's unintuitive, difficult to read and parse, and is saddled with much of the cruft of years of Windows; when you compare it (or NSIS, or InstallShield) to building an .app (or even a .pkg) under OS X, it fares very poorly.

Re: Visual Studio 2013 released to web

#126
post #95

This rant has been brewing for many years... Everything's been downhill since VS6. I'm only joking, but seriously, does anyone remember how lightning fast VS6 was? That was over 15 years ago with much slower computers. I guess application 'snappiness' has not been a priority for the Visual Studio decision makers. I've used VS since the late 90s (writing node.js in ST2 now) and honestly appreciate the hard work and co…

I got bit by being really productive in VC6 like 10 years ago. Had a script to clone a template dsw/dsp file, which make a new one, so I have about 400 projects like that, for little experiments, little projects.

Upgrading each of these projects to the 2010/2012/2013 IDE requires about 5 minutes of manual steps - per project!

I still keep a VC6 on my machine (even though it barely works on Win7) because of all that.

What got me stuck on VC6: I benchmarked OutputDebugString in the 2002/2003 versions, and noticed that they were ~10x slower.

The new compilers are a lot better, for sure.

Re: Visual Studio 2013 released to web

#127
post #95

This rant has been brewing for many years... Everything's been downhill since VS6. I'm only joking, but seriously, does anyone remember how lightning fast VS6 was? That was over 15 years ago with much slower computers. I guess application 'snappiness' has not been a priority for the Visual Studio decision makers. I've used VS since the late 90s (writing node.js in ST2 now) and honestly appreciate the hard work and co…

Couldn't agree more. It's not just speed, but design defects that should not have existed even 15 years ago. Look at this review of some of this crap: http://goldmanosi.blogspot.com/2012/05/visual-studio-is-it-g...

Re: Visual Studio 2013 released to web

#128
post #126
post #95

This rant has been brewing for many years... Everything's been downhill since VS6. I'm only joking, but seriously, does anyone remember how lightning fast VS6 was? That was over 15 years ago with much slower computers. I guess application 'snappiness' has not been a priority for the Visual Studio decision makers. I've used VS since the late 90s (writing node.js in ST2 now) and honestly appreciate the hard work and co…

I got bit by being really productive in VC6 like 10 years ago. Had a script to clone a template dsw/dsp file, which make a new one, so I have about 400 projects like that, for little experiments, little projects. Upgrading each of these projects to the 2010/2012/2013 IDE requires about 5 minutes of manual steps - per project! I still keep a VC6 on my machine (even though it barely works on Win7) because of all that.…

Ha ha, OutputDebugString. Heaven forbid that printf go to the goddamned console like a normal system. And that's just one of many asinine deficiencies in VS. It is indeed going backward: http://goldmanosi.blogspot.com/2012/05/visual-studio-is-it-g...

Re: Visual Studio 2013 released to web

#129
post #126
post #95

This rant has been brewing for many years... Everything's been downhill since VS6. I'm only joking, but seriously, does anyone remember how lightning fast VS6 was? That was over 15 years ago with much slower computers. I guess application 'snappiness' has not been a priority for the Visual Studio decision makers. I've used VS since the late 90s (writing node.js in ST2 now) and honestly appreciate the hard work and co…

I got bit by being really productive in VC6 like 10 years ago. Had a script to clone a template dsw/dsp file, which make a new one, so I have about 400 projects like that, for little experiments, little projects. Upgrading each of these projects to the 2010/2012/2013 IDE requires about 5 minutes of manual steps - per project! I still keep a VC6 on my machine (even though it barely works on Win7) because of all that.…

VC6 was notable for simply discarding OutputDebugString output when things got busy. This was a problem I used to suffer from quite regularly, and it caused me a lot of bother.

I have no idea just how they managed to utterly fuck up the performance in VS2002 and later, but it does at least capture every last char of output, if you have the patience to wait for it.

(Perhaps on modern multi-core multi-GHz CPUs the VC6 approach is reliable enough, assuming it's some timing issue. But I have to say that I do prefer the VS2002+ tradeoff. Wish somebody would just fix the whole sorry mess though.)

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