Submitted by “One of the highlights of my recent trip to Europe was getting the chance to publicly show off some of the new features in our next release of Visual Studio and the .NET Framework (codenamed ‘Orcas’) for the first time publicly. You can download the deck I presented here [.ppt]. You can also watch a version of the Belgium talk. Orcas is going to be a pretty exciting release, and contains a ton of great functionality that I think you will really love. I’ll be drilling down into more details of it over the next few months in many more blog posts.”
Well, they say it should be released later this year, so I guess we can expect it sometime in 2009.
Seems to be a lot of new web/asp.net stuff, but I’m wondering if there’s anything in the new framework for desktop programmers. For example, I notice that for some things, it is still necessary to hack the Win32 API to get at, such as monitoring for clipboard data (using .NET 2.0). Would be nice if these things were part of the framework.
“Well, they say it should be released later this year, so I guess we can expect it sometime in 2009.”
Microsoft has always done a pretty good job of shipping their developer tools on time…and not only that, they ship stable and secure.
As far as the clipboard issue you mentioned, can that not be done with the built in Clipboard object? Granted most of my work w/ .Net has been web based and not desktop oriented, so I honestly don’t know but I would assume it’s in the clipboard class somewhere.
Microsoft has always done a pretty good job of shipping their developer tools on time…and not only that, they ship stable and secure.
I’m not entirely sure where this comes from or what it is actually based on:
http://minimsft.blogspot.com/2005/11/hey-shareholders-vs-2005-is-fa…
http://codebetter.com/blogs/brendan.tompkins/archive/2006/03/10/140…
Saying it enough times doesn’t make it true.
Microsoft simply has too many programmers producing too many development tools that no one can possibly keep up with, let alone learn and code finished software with.
I had my complaints about VS 2005 as well, but after using it in a daily basis they faded, and just like any other software you learn to live with/work around the quirks. The additional features added made the annoyances tolerable. More than tolerable actually.
Linking to 2 bloggers doesn’t make it true/untrue either; I can find plenty of bloggers who were satisfied with the new release.
“…let alone learn and code finished software with.”
I’ve yet to come across anyone who couldn’t finish a software project due to limitations of VS. You can only blame the IDE for so many things.
http://www.charlespetzold.com/etc/DoesVisualStudioRotTheMind.html
Visual C++ 6.0 — still the best, most stable, and most usable version of Visual Studio ever produced
It is. But the newer ones have nicer toys to play with. DotNet/CSharp are more fun.
Linking to 2 bloggers doesn’t make it true/untrue either; I can find plenty of bloggers who were satisfied with the new release.
Would you rather I filled the whole comment space? I think you need to get out more, and Googling will tell you all you need to know. There are some well known big issues with VS 2005, it is known to be bug ridden, and if you don’t know them then you don’t know much about it to comment.
Visual C++ 5.0 and 6.0 (and classic VB) are still the most usable IDEs in the Visual Studio family, and Microsoft seems intent on heading right in the other direction.
But hey, none of that matters because we have a new and incredibly exciting new version of Visual Studio! I think you somewhat missed my point about Microsoft having too many developers producing too many development tools and features that no one has the time or the business justification to use. People would rather they have development tools that work simply and straightforwardly and………well, just work actually. The MSDN faction at Microsoft, as Joel Spolsky calls it, is increasingly losing its grip on reality. Note also, in that second link where he describes Microsoft simply dropping support for SQL Server 2000, or at least making it more difficult to use, in various areas for no apparent reason. Expect that sort of thing to get much worse.
These days I don’t use any of the .Net versions of Visual Studio very much at all after being continually disappointed; mainly VB and VC++ which still gets used at one place because there is zero business case to rewrite anything in .Net (you tend to find that a lot). Everything else I do with Ruby, Eclipse and some Qt. Microsoft has lost me as a developer, and I suspect they are losing many others, because they live in happy-go-lucky, uber exciting MSDN world that is disconnected from development that the rest of us have to do.
Rant over. Exciting is simply not the word to use in describing Visual Studio releases.
“Would you rather I filled the whole comment space?”
Sure, and I’ll fill the whole comment space with snippets from folks who loved it. Other people’s opinions don’t matter to me, I care what myself and the team of 50+ developers I work with think of it. Is it flawless? No. Bug ridden? Hardly. A couple of large bugs, for which there are easy workarounds. They certainly haven’t slowed down anyone I know who spends any considerable amount of time with the IDE.
After my team switched to 2005, productivity went up around 10-15%, and that’s the bread and butter for our boss.
“I think you somewhat missed my point about Microsoft having too many developers producing too many development tools and features that no one has the time or the business justification to use.”
I glazed over it, yeah. I don’t care how many developers it took to write a new version of whatever tool, so long as it got written and shipped. I would like to hear about these so called “worthless” features you speak of though, cuz I’ve yet to find any features in VS that were added haphazardly and without reason., or that haven’t improved productivity.
I think the .Net world is grateful that you’re staying in the 1998 world of VB/VC++. MS lost you as a developer? Please hold on while I wait for the collective sigh of relief from the .Net world…hmm, they didn’t even notice.
Business justification or not, if companies aren’t doing most new development in .Net, it’s not a company I’d want to be a part of…that kind of old dog mentality has no place in the professional workspace.
As far as the clipboard issue you mentioned, can that not be done with the built in Clipboard object?
AFAIK, actually monitoring for changes on the clipboard from your app can only be done via Win32 API calls.
It would seem you are correct, the SetClipboardViewer Win32 API has to be used to register a clipboard “listener.” It does look fairly trivial though, which makes it even more surprising this hasn’t been included in the BCL somewhere. There are probably some fairly hefty security requirements behind spec’ing that out for the BCL though. Not that that’s a valid excuse, but experience has shown me that if it’s not in the BCL, MS usually had a good reason for excluding it.
Seems to be a lot of new web/asp.net stuff, but I’m wondering if there’s anything in the new framework for desktop programmers.
LINQ and the Entity Data Model (ADO.NET vNext) are probably the biggest items coming in 3.5. For C++/CLR devs, there’s STL/CLR. Then there’s integrated designers in Orcas for WinFX technologies, which while not an addition to the Framework, will ease development of apps based on new technologies like WPF. There’s a bit more info, including some feature specification documents here:
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/aa700830.aspx
Edited 2007-02-10 03:02
Unfortunately I think there’s a lot of bugs left over from VS2005 that won’t get fixed. Many of the new features added just didn’t work so well.
Example:
XML documentation for methods creating documentation in the InteliSense. Great feature, just sort of broken.
This works great for C# but was sort of half-assed for C++/CLI. Any method using generics (another great feature of .NET 2.0) broke the InteliSense documentation.
When a bug report was filed, this was MS response:
http://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/ViewFeedback.asp…
“Thanks for taking the time to report this issue. We’re sorry for the inconvenience this issue has created for you. Unfortunately, it is not among the highest priority issues we need to address in our next major release, but we’ll keep it in mind for future releases.”
Now sure, things like that don’t effect the functionality of the compiler, but it’s just one of the many fancy new features that only sort of made it in ro VS2005. And since these aren’t critical to code generation, I get the feeling that they’ll still only be sort of functional in the new release.