> No Visual Studio installation. No GUI. No prayer. Just a script that does exactly what it says.
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I fixed Windows native development
31–40 of 406 posts
Re: I fixed Windows native development
#32Another option is explore winget and chocolaty. Most build tools and compilers can be installed via the command line on windows. Ask your favorite LLM to create a powershell script to install them all.
Re: I fixed Windows native development
#33It starts by not looking into Windows through UNIX developer glasses. The only issue currently plaguing Windows development is the mess with WinUI and WinAppSDK since Project Reunion, however they are relatively easy to ignore.
>It starts by not looking into Windows through UNIX developer glasses.
People don't need any UNIX biases to just want multiple versions of MSVS to work the way Microsoft advertises. For example, with every new version of Visual Studio, Microsoft always says you can install it side-by-side with an older version.
But every time, the new version of VS has a bug in the install somewhere that changes something that breaks old projects. It doesn't break for everybody or for all projects but it's always a recurring bug report with new versions. VS2019 broke something in existing VS2017 installs. VS2022 broke something in VS2019. etc.
The "side-by-side-installs-is-supposed-to-work-but-sometimes-doesn't" tradition continues with the latest VS2026 breaking something in VS2022. E.g. https://github.com/dotnet/sdk/issues/51796
I once installed VS2019 side-by-side with VS2017 and when I used VS2017 to re-open a VS2017 WinForms project, it had red squiggly lines in the editor when viewing cs files and the build failed. I now just install different versions of MSVS in totally separate virtual machines to avoid problems.
I predict that a future version VS2030 will have install bugs that breaks VS2026. The underlying issue that causes side-by-side bugs to re-appear is that MSVS installs are integrated very deeply into Windows. Puts files in c:\windows\system32, etc. (And sometimes you also get the random breakage with mismatched MSVCRT???.DLL files) To avoid future bugs, Microsoft would have to re-architect how MSVS works -- or "containerize" it to isolate it more.
In contrast, gcc/clang can have more isolation without each version interfering with each other.
I'm not arguing this thread's msvcup.exe tool is necessary but I understand the motivations to make MSVS less fragile and more predictable.
Re: I fixed Windows native development
#34Is this post AI-written? The repeated lists with highlighted key points, the "it's not just [x], but [y]" and "no [a] just [b]" scream LLM to me. It would be good to know how much of this post and this project was human-built.
Re: I fixed Windows native development
#35* Is this allowed per VS' ToS?
* I wonder if Microsoft intentionally doesn't provide this first party to force everyone to install VS, especially the professional/enterprise versions. One could imagine that we'd have a vsproject.toml file similar to pyproject.toml that just does everything when combined with a minimal command line tool. But that doesn't exist for some reason.
Re: I fixed Windows native development
#36At the risk of being that guy , I haven't had any issues onboarding people onto native projects written in Rust. rustup does a great job of fetching the required toolchains without issue. I'd imagine the same is also true of Go or Zig.
Before rustup can run, the very first message rustup-init spits out is asking to install the visual studio tool chain.
Re: I fixed Windows native development
#37Re: I fixed Windows native development
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The Visual Studio toolchain does have LTSC and stable releases - no one seems to know about them though. You only get access to the LTSC channel if you have a license for at least Visual Studio Professional (Community won't do it); so a lot of hobbyist programmers and students are not aware of it. On the other hand, its existence is in my experience very well-known among people who use Visual Studio for work at som…
You can install the LTSC toolchain without a license. Just not the IDE.
That's not correct. You don't have to give your credit card details or even be logged in but you are still required to have any Visual Studio license. For hobbyists and startups the VS Community license is enough but larger companies need a VS Professional license even for the VS Build Tools.
How strict Microsoft is with enforcement of this license is another story.
Re: I fixed Windows native development
#39I'm just asking, but is there really a need for a native programs anymore? Where I worked a decade ago, we started porting all our native programs over to the browser and this was when MVC beta was just being released. At this point with Electron and Tauri, is there even a need to write a native program
Now with AI, I would think that porting a native program to the browser wouldn't be the chore it once was.
Re: I fixed Windows native development
#40[deleted]