This document contains a summary of Microsoft’s plan for Visual Studio .NET and the .NET Framework over the next two releases. Designed to assist customers in their planning process, it is not a comprehensive “feature dump,” but more an overview of general themes and direction—an explanation of the development issues that Microsoft is planning to help customers address in each new release.
Microsoft Developer Tools Roadmap 2002–2004
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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In Visual Studio “Everett” C++ developers will be pleased to find that the key metric for measuring code portability, ANSI/ISO compliance, will be significantly increased. The ANSI/ISO C++ standard is the generally accepted standard for the C++ language, and all C++ compiler vendors measure compatibility against this standard. In Visual Studio “Everett” Visual C++ will be in the upper 90 percent range for ANSI/ISO compatibility (and higher still in “Visual Studio for Yukon”), making it far easier for developers to build applications that target Windows and many UNIX variants. Microsoft expects many developers worldwide using C++ to see this development as an opportunity to try Visual C++ .NET.
This is by far the most important improvement that could have been made. One has to wonder, though, how this will fit in with the CLR, which provides its own versions of many C++ standard library things, such as containers and streams. I think that most C++ developers will probably just use the C++ standard library normally and the CLR classes only when they need to create interfaces that will work with other languages.
Comments? Or do most developers here not use Visual C++.NET?
Comments? Or do most developers here not use Visual C++.NET?
I agree that this is a nice improvement, but due to Microsoft’s dumb EULA it makes no sense to use VS.NET to do cross-platform programming if you plan to give your stuff away under the GPL; so I don’t use it.
Personally, I like gcc fine. However, for those who like a more visual IDE or RAD environment, are interested in releasing under the GPL, and either run Linux or plan to have your application run under Linux, I think Kylix 3, which supports C++, would be a far better cross-platform development tool than VisualStudio.NET.
But that’s me. I have no idea what other people think.
What they do is to influence WHAT you do with their development tools, through their EULA. They forbit you to use whatever license you want to use for your programs. I just can’t and never will agree to such a practice. Rather will I forgo some comfort (and use some not as good development environment) and be free.
Why should Microsoft allow its developers to adopt licensing models that would force Microsoft to relicense the redistributable components under the GPL? Unlike the LGPL, the GPL is a viral licensing scheme that attempts to force others to comply with its beliefs in free software.