Microsoft said it will soon release a new version of its Visual Studio toolset for Windows Vista development. Jay Roxe, group product manager for Visual Studio, said Microsoft will introduce a new release of the Visual Studio targeting Vista development, known as Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 Update for Windows Vista, as soon as March 5 but possibly as late as March 12 depending on when internal developers clear the code for general use.
Like everything else MS does, it’ll be junk, and it’ll cost a mint…
I use a great little IDE called “Geany” (Google and you’ll find it). Simple but very nicely done.
Uhem, Visual Studio is the most advanced and rapid development environments today. Nothing compares to it. That’s an opinion shared by tens if not hundreds of thousands.
As for cost, you’re generalising in a big way. Not everything costs a mint. You should check out IE, Virual PC, the entire Express range of Visual Studio environments and much more on the Microsoft website.
Your views on junk are pure opinion without any factual basis. Very few people pay for junk, yet Microsoft is worth billions annually. That cannot be all marketing and brain dead users buying the software blindly.
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Uhem, Visual Studio is the most advanced and rapid development environments today. Nothing compares to it. That’s an opinion shared by tens if not hundreds of thousands.
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The astroturfing gets more blatant every day…
VS produces bloated crap – always has done.
Uhem, Visual Studio is the most advanced and rapid development environments today. Nothing compares to it. That’s an opinion shared by tens if not hundreds of thousands.
I haven’t used other tools besides VS to develop .NET apps (its not my choice which tools my company uses). Sure the C# text editor part of the IDE has some nice features but the project build support is far behind that of C++ projects. It has some surprising limitations that I would hope other IDE vendors don’t have.
There is no way to pass compiler command line arguments to the C# compiler. There is no way to even specify pre- and post-build events per configuration (debug,release,etc). There is no way to specify different /reference’s per configuration. All of these things are easy with C++ and C++/CLI projects.
These complaints might seem petty but I cannot build my application because of them and have to resort to makefiles.
You should check out IE, Virual PC, the entire Express range of Visual Studio environments and much more on the Microsoft website.
As an aside, do you think an article/review about my experiences with Virtual PC would make a good article for OSNews?
“That’s an opinion shared by tens if not hundreds of thousands.”
You know what they say about flies, their demographics and their culinary habits.
I’ll rely on my own experience of using this thing daily. And this experience says that this is a piece of garbage that is used only because “you’ll never be blamed for choosing microsoft” – and also because it’s the only tool that can really be used to develop on their shit os.
This service pack is awesome, by the way. It takes an hour to install. This speaks volume about the complete incompetency of microsoft developer’s. Those guys have no notion of managing a bunch of data in a way that scale.
I’m now heading toward a complete reinstallation of this marvelous tool because it fails to compile anything now, by the way. Business as usual.
I tried to check the knowledge base url mentioned in the about box, which is hilariously non existing.
Keep up the good work guys.
Edited 2007-03-06 15:29
Roxe noted that when Microsoft released the beta for Visual 2005 Service Pack 1, the company asked the beta testers whether they wanted Microsoft to ship Service Pack 1 first as an upgrade before Vista shipped en masse or whether the company should wait until after the Vista release. Roxe said the customer base responded that they wanted an upgrade immediately and then another refresh after Vista became broadly available.
I wonder how many Microsoft releases have been guided by beta testers wanting new software ASAP — bugs and all — and willing to use it as-is with the promise of a update to have all the bugs fixed and the final features added.
This is the exact opposite of what I want. I want MS to delay the release of their software, especially there development tools until its rock solid. Why? Because we cannot upgrade.
I work for a company that develops software for use within AutoCAD which has a rich “plugin” environment called ObjectARX (all C++). AutoDesk hard links with a specific version of MFC and other support libraries when they build. This means we must use the exact same compiler and libraries as them, and when they upgrade we upgrade. To support older versions of AutoCAD we have to use older compilers and do multiple builds and ship multiple binaries.
Currently we use Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Studio 2002. If we applied the Visual Studio 2005 service pack we would no longer be able to build, run or debug.
We will be stuck with Visual Studio 2005 without service packs until my company decides to no longer support AutoCAD 2007. Its going to be a while. Only recently did we drop support for AutoCAD 2002 which allowed us to finally stop using Visual Studio 6.
Visual Studio is NOT the best RAD tool on the Market nor is it the only one.
It might be the best Managed code IDE on the market, but after having used both, CodeGear Delphi is far superior in almost every aspect, especially database development.
VS can’t make a natively compiled executable in a RAD way, you are restricted to managed code for that. See how fast you can make a win32 GUI app with Visual C++
I for one don’t like having to worry about the VM runtime that is required. Do yourself a favor and checkout CodeGear Delphi at http://www.codegear.com You can even download a free version that can be used to write commercial code from http://www.turboexplorer.com/
“Visual Studio is NOT the best RAD tool on the Market nor is it the only one.”
Fine, it’s the best RAD tool for Windows development, period. Seeing as 100% of ISV’s and the vast majority of IT departments target apps towards Windows, that makes it pretty much the defacto standard.
“VS can’t make a natively compiled executable in a RAD way, you are restricted to managed code for that.”
First off, managed code doesn’t compile down to a native executable, so technically you’re a bit off there. Second off making a Win32 app with VC++ is as easy as creating an MFC app. All crapiness aside, MFC is pretty much the only way to go for creating native C++ GUI apps on Windows. It’s no worse than many other widget based toolkits out there.
“I for one don’t like having to worry about the VM runtime that is required.”
Nor do we .Net developers. Some version of .Net is guaranteed to be installed on almost all Windows machines by virtue of it being included in the latest SP’s for Win2k and XP, and coming preloaded on Vista.
“Fine, it’s the best RAD tool for Windows development, period.”
That’s just your opinion. Since there are alternatives obviously not everyone agree that it’s the best.
“Seeing as 100% of ISV’s”
Not true. it’s probably pretty high but by no means 100%.
“and the vast majority of IT departments target apps towards Windows”
Apart for those enterprises that uses Oracle and Java etc of course.
“I for one don’t like having to worry about the VM runtime that is required.”
Nor do we .Net developers. Some version of .Net is guaranteed to be installed on almost all Windows machines by virtue of it being included in the latest SP’s for Win2k and XP, and coming preloaded on Vista.
… but I don’t want to use some version of .NET. I want to use .NET 2.0. How pervasive is the latest version compared to “some” version?
It’s an opinion shared by most, I’m not just eschewing nonsense here.
If there is an ISV that doesn’t target Windows, they have an extremely poor business model. I’m pretty sure it’s 99.9%…think about it from a business perspective. If an ISV wants to make money, they absolutely must target Windows as a platform.
I’m willing to bet my laptop that there isn’t a single fortune 1000 (hell, even a fortune 5000) company that doesn’t do Windows development of some kind. The days of being a <insert technology here> shop are long gone.
“Second off making a Win32 app with VC++ is as easy as creating an MFC app. All crapiness aside, MFC is pretty much the only way to go for creating native C++ GUI apps on Windows. It’s no worse than many other widget based toolkits out there.”
I’m maintaining a large MFC application, and I can tell you without a doubt that whoever designed MFC has no clue how C++ works. And no clue about how to create anything with any elegance and simplicity in it.
That thing doesn’t even support more than a handful basic widgets out of the box.
Since I suspect that the same people have been involved in designing .net, you’ll understand why I won’t touch that thing with a ten foot pole.
I’d go as far as to think that MFC is single handedly responsible for most of the negative image of C++.
Once again, this is a mediocre piece of crapware that has been used just because it has been made by microsoft.
Note how even them distanced themselves from this thing since then.
Want to make a C++ windows GUI? Use Qt. That it doesn’t wrap the awful native controls but reimplement them altogether is nothing but an advantage. Note that microsoft does that too nowadays.
@MORB You’re absolutely correct about MFC, it’s an abomination and yes Qt is a much better alternative in terms of elegant design and extensibility. I would choose it every time for native Windows development.
However, you are 100% wrong about .NET. When Win32/MFC were the only choices offered by MS for Windows development, Borland were then wowing developers with something called Delphi. When MS started with .NET, guess who they hired to design the C# language and many of the frameworks? It was Anders Hejlsberg, the chief designer of Delphi.
You’re doing yourself a disservice if you ignore .NET because you think it’s anything like MFC.
Regards,
Ian
Edited 2007-03-06 17:41
I might be mistaken, because it is some time since I developed windows software using c++, but I am pretty sure, that Visuel studio, newer had any rad support for developing win32 software.
It might have som rad support for MFC, but MFC is such garbadge, that I prefered to develop directly to the win32 api.
I would actuelly say, that for rad c++ development(Not .net), the best solution for windows, is to use the gui builder included with qt4.2, and then use visual studio as editor.
An other interesting thing, is that the eclipse/cdt team, have just released a public beta/milestone build of cdt version 4. And unlike version 3, it is actuelly fast enough to be usefull, and got some nice features too.
So if I had to develop software for windows now, I think i might want to use eclipse as editor/build environment, and then qt(For big apps) or the win32(For small apps).
One thing I would like to know is:
Does anyone know of any kind of rad environment that targets win32? I have newer been able to find one, and there is a real posibility that I have to delevop some windows software soon.