Visual Studio 2013 released to web(blogs.msdn.com)
blogs.msdn.com
Visual Studio 2013 released to web
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudio/archive/2013/10/17/visual-studio-2013-released-to-web.aspx
161 comments
> I'm only joking, but seriously, does anyone remember how lightning fast VS6 was? That was over 15 years ago with much slower computers.
Keep in mind that "nostalgia" is another word for "brain rot", and the human memory is a liar.
I spent most of 1995 and 1996 using Mac LC 475 for DTP. Great times. Hauntingly easy to use.
I spent 1998-99 on Windows NT with Office 97, which was actually more usable for the same job.
1999, I used someone's LC 475. I was horrified how clunky the exact same thing felt, a few years later.
tl;dr I suggest you actually fire up VS6 and try using it for stuff and see what you think now.
Keep in mind that "nostalgia" is another word for "brain rot", and the human memory is a liar.
I spent most of 1995 and 1996 using Mac LC 475 for DTP. Great times. Hauntingly easy to use.
I spent 1998-99 on Windows NT with Office 97, which was actually more usable for the same job.
1999, I used someone's LC 475. I was horrified how clunky the exact same thing felt, a few years later.
tl;dr I suggest you actually fire up VS6 and try using it for stuff and see what you think now.
VS6 was a massive downgrade on VS5, in that the help system was no longer treated as a dockable window within VS. I relied on the documentation at that point, but when VS6 came along it was no longer something I could easily have in front of me, with my code, with the VS window full screen. </nostalgic rant>
I think you may have selective memory with regards to VS6 (understandable over 15 years). Having recently worked at a company that for silly reasons did not upgrade beyond VS6, it was not lightning fast, took several minutes to open, and crashed frequently even with smaller projects.
Modern VS really needs to work on managing large projects- but this isn't something it ever had to begin with, and has certainly improved since VS6 despite added functionality. The responsiveness issues you list seem a little more problematic than normal from my experiences- I would definitely try uninstalling a few plugins and seeing if that helps.
Modern VS really needs to work on managing large projects- but this isn't something it ever had to begin with, and has certainly improved since VS6 despite added functionality. The responsiveness issues you list seem a little more problematic than normal from my experiences- I would definitely try uninstalling a few plugins and seeing if that helps.
Bingo. I've regularly worked with 15+ project solutions, and never noticed much hanging. Read through this guy's entire comment wondering what he was talking about until I got to that part:
> Also, VS would block for me a lot, but that was probably due using too many plugins.
Yeah, that's where your problem is. I'd put good money on ReSharper being the problem, as it's slowed me down in the past. Uninstalled it and never had another problem. The only plugin I have now is VsVim (which I highly recommend for those who'd like vim bindings.)
> Also, VS would block for me a lot, but that was probably due using too many plugins.
Yeah, that's where your problem is. I'd put good money on ReSharper being the problem, as it's slowed me down in the past. Uninstalled it and never had another problem. The only plugin I have now is VsVim (which I highly recommend for those who'd like vim bindings.)
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.
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.
R# 8.0.0 had a bug where it would crash VS from time-to-time. I ran `devenv /safemode` to load VS without any third party stuff in an attempt to identify the problem and my god, it was fast.
I have a 28 project solution, and with R# the IDE is still plenty fast but every so often I think about just how fast VS was without plugins.
I have a 28 project solution, and with R# the IDE is still plenty fast but every so often I think about just how fast VS was without plugins.
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.
VS6 was very fast, but its compiler was bad at standard compliance. GCC was much better. The newer MS compilers are way better at supportiung the standard and they also did a great job integrating the new language features. So I would say there is significant progress since the days of VS6 :)
That being said, VS 2012 works pretty fast for me (I'm on a fairly beefy machine though).
How many projects do you consider to be a 'great number'? I ask because I do development in VS with solutions that contain around 300 projects and don't experience anything close to what I would consider 'really sludgy'.
~50. A lot of the projects were created in older versions of VS, which may or may not matter.
Cool. I see in another response to your post that someone mentions minute load times just to load up the solution file, something which I thankfully have not experienced just yet.
Makes me wonder what's accounting for the varied performance? Probably some combination of project size, plugins, and machine specs, I reckon. If one mans (persons) 10 projects contain 100x the code that my 50 projects contain it would certainly make sense to have longer load times.
Makes me wonder what's accounting for the varied performance? Probably some combination of project size, plugins, and machine specs, I reckon. If one mans (persons) 10 projects contain 100x the code that my 50 projects contain it would certainly make sense to have longer load times.
I also don't see speed issues in VS 2012, even with solutions that contain 100+ projects.
Chromium is an extreme case of this. When we started we wanted to live the VS way of life (IDE tools and the like), so we had a Chrome.sln and various projects. Eventually it became too much. It would take minutes to load the sln, and woe to you if you synced your source tree while msvs was open, as you'd receive a neverending slew of modal prompts asking you to reload each of hundreds of projects. I think we still have a msvs build, but most developers use ninja on Windows, and just use msvs for debugging. The sad fact is that addons like Visual Assist X provide many of the benefits of the IDE without requiring projects to be loaded.
How many projects does chromium have? I typically work in a solution w/ about 175 projects and it only takes about 10 seconds to load up for me on 2012.
Semi OT: what is ninja? Tried looking it up but couldn't come up with a meaningful result.
The hundreds of modal prompts are combined into a single 'Reload All'. Only since VS2012 though if I'm not mistaken.
[deleted]
What is the argument for keeping it all in the same solution?
It's a single product, composed of multiple projects/targets building different dlls/executables. That was my understanding of the point of a "solution" (vs the old days of VC6 when there were only projects and workspaces). Anyway, it used to work back in the days when most of Chrome's code came from WebKit. Now we're many times bigger. It's clear MSVS' project UI is not intended for building projects of this scale. I'm assuming Microsoft doesn't use this UI to develop windows, or office, so it's not surprising this case isn't supported.
I have no idea what the Windows or Office people do, but the Visual Studio group certainly does build their own software in VS. (Or did as of mid 2009 when I quit, anyway.) It was not a particularly pleasant experience!
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.
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.
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.)
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.)
The initial load is slow. VS is a huge system with a lot of plugins. But I think it's still quite fast. I generally do VS on the fastest computer I own, which sucks, but oh well... it's still more usable and faster compare to Eclipse.
http://visualstudio.uservoice.com/forums/121579-visual-studi...
Apparrently there is a requirement to have IE10 installed. Dealbreaker for many in the corp world.
These should be developed independently.
Apparrently there is a requirement to have IE10 installed. Dealbreaker for many in the corp world.
These should be developed independently.
Why is a dealbreaker for a development machine to have a certain browser installed?
we're still on Windows 7. On XP, until April.
Since moving to OS X, I've left Visual Studio behind. At first, I had a boot camp partition running windows so I could still develop our C#-based web product. Then eventually we changed the product significantly enough that moving to an OSS tech stack made sense.
I'd probably still be using some MSFT technologies if I could use a VSS-style IDE on OS X without virtualization (I tired MonoDevelop, but it just wan't the same). I didn't have issues with the speed of Visual Studio running on my beefed up MBPro, but the keybinding stuff was just too much to deal with.
Not to mention, having a ton of different runtime/hosting options is a pretty nice bonus for the OSS stack.
Also, for mostly web apps, I think Visual Studio is massive overkill (but I'll still watch their videos on features).
For now, I've settled happily using on cross-platform tools (PyCharm/WebStorm for a feature rich IDE and Sublime Text 2 for code editing, and VIm when tweaking stuff on the server). Should I ever go back to Windows (likely, because I want a Surface Pro 2), my tooling should carry over (though I'll have to go through some keybinding issues again).
Never again will I use products that are locked down to a single OS. Even the tools on my Mac (with the exception of Keynote) run on Windows and vice-versa.
I'd probably still be using some MSFT technologies if I could use a VSS-style IDE on OS X without virtualization (I tired MonoDevelop, but it just wan't the same). I didn't have issues with the speed of Visual Studio running on my beefed up MBPro, but the keybinding stuff was just too much to deal with.
Not to mention, having a ton of different runtime/hosting options is a pretty nice bonus for the OSS stack.
Also, for mostly web apps, I think Visual Studio is massive overkill (but I'll still watch their videos on features).
For now, I've settled happily using on cross-platform tools (PyCharm/WebStorm for a feature rich IDE and Sublime Text 2 for code editing, and VIm when tweaking stuff on the server). Should I ever go back to Windows (likely, because I want a Surface Pro 2), my tooling should carry over (though I'll have to go through some keybinding issues again).
Never again will I use products that are locked down to a single OS. Even the tools on my Mac (with the exception of Keynote) run on Windows and vice-versa.
There are few new features I actually need. I want speed. Speed when compiling(currently it's file-copy mania), speed when starting my project(minutes of loading debug symbol, really?)
I'm still using VS 2010 at work. Can't seem to make a compelling case to upgrade for the cost, and it's just getting more frustrating.
VS 2013 is looking like a really great product, especially in comparison to VS 2010.
VS 2013 is looking like a really great product, especially in comparison to VS 2010.
Yes! 2013 feels much faster and lighter too. No more waiting for a while for it to be page-faulted in when you wake up an idle .sln
Dear god this has been fixed? Upgrading right away.
Support for large projects/solutions was greatly improved. VS2012 added deferred loading for some items so you can open and get into code faster.
Of course, this is purely an artifact of overly large solutions. If you've inherited any of those, as I have, it's worth the upgrade for the improved performance, IMO.
Of course, this is purely an artifact of overly large solutions. If you've inherited any of those, as I have, it's worth the upgrade for the improved performance, IMO.
Depending on what are you using, C++11 complete support is more that enough reason for upgrade to me. :)
Sold! Where can I confirm that VS 2013 is fully C++11 compliant?
While VS 2013 has much better C++11 support it's not close to full compliance. The Visual C++ team have decided to work on C++11/C++14 together which is slowing C++11 a bit.
Here's a blog post laying out their plans.
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/somasegar/archive/2013/06/28/cpp-con...
There's also a quite detailed talk by Herb Sutter on channel 9 as well. http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Build/2013/2-306
There's also a quite detailed talk by Herb Sutter on channel 9 as well. http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Build/2013/2-306
VS 2008 here, somebody apparently tested 2012 but nothing came out of it with people fearing that a different C++ compiler will break everything...
I use VS2008 for C++ and VS2012 for .NET. I upgraded our C++ projects to VS2012 as a proof-of-concept and build times went from 5 minutes to 15.
Our projects aren't particularly great, virtually everything is in stdafx.h directly or indirectly and small changes results in rebuilding. The increase in build time would have hurt us.
VS2013 is a bit faster (~10 minutes, last time I checked) but still a bit of a hit. Allegedly this is due to the extra time parsing the C++11 language bits.
I don't think this is a huge deal (our code should be better), rather something to bear in mind.
Also, if you recreate your project instead of upgrading it you'll end up with a default instruction set of SSE2 (instead of SSE) and your exe will suddenly not run on Athlon XP-era chips.
Upgrading is not something to be done lightly.
Our projects aren't particularly great, virtually everything is in stdafx.h directly or indirectly and small changes results in rebuilding. The increase in build time would have hurt us.
VS2013 is a bit faster (~10 minutes, last time I checked) but still a bit of a hit. Allegedly this is due to the extra time parsing the C++11 language bits.
I don't think this is a huge deal (our code should be better), rather something to bear in mind.
Also, if you recreate your project instead of upgrading it you'll end up with a default instruction set of SSE2 (instead of SSE) and your exe will suddenly not run on Athlon XP-era chips.
Upgrading is not something to be done lightly.
IMHO the killer feature with VS 2012 is C# 5 and await/async. It takes a good afternoon to get your head around it but is totally worth it (unless you develop CPU-bound web applications exclusively, I suppose).
I'm still on VS 2008 as well. Is there anyone who has upgraded a substantially sized C++ project from VS 2008 to one of the newer versions that would be willing to share their experiences?
Yes. 700 of them in fact, from VS2008 to VS2010, a couple of years ago. Here's what I found...
- VS2010's macro system is just broken, and fails to coexist with VS2008. Basic macros using the DTE object work; more sophisticated ones (I have a few that used DTE90 - or was it DTE80? - anyway, whatever, they manipulated project properties) seemed to be literally impossible to make work, due to some kind of conflict between system-global components that both try to install. Pretty shameful.
- VS2010+ craps massive files into your solution folder, worse even than the NCB palaver, and so your more junior and/or inept programmers will keep checking that junk into source control.
- It's common in VS2008 to change the build product name by going to the Linker or Librarian property page and just changing that Output File property. VS2010 doesn't like this, though, due to some MSBuild limitation, and would much prefer you to modify the settings in the General page, leaving the output file name as its default of something like "$(OutputFolder)$(OutputName)$(OutputExt)". Of course, the project upgrade doesn't actually do anything about this for you, so after importing all your projects that work the old way way, they won't work properly, and you have to fix each one up yourself.
- VS2010 dependencies aren't like VS2008 dependencies. There's a new C#-style References section that manages the linking. Dependencies can still be set, but they only affect build order. (Also - when you change dependencies, you need to close and restart Visual Studio, because sometimes they don't take effect properly.)
- The new C#-style references are part of the project, not part of the solution, so they come with the project when you add it into a solution. Add a project but forget its references and you just get a cryptic error (along the lines of "Project has no Debug|Win32 configuration") when you try to build; to add insult to injury, when you go to the References page, the missing reference is not actually shown, because (of course...) it's not in the solution. You need to open the vcxproj in a text editor and look at its contents and compare it to the references VS2010 shows you to work out which is missing.
- When a project refers to a non-existent file, the project will be considered permanently out of date. VS2010 won't give you any clue about what's wrong, and to track the problem down you (as I recall...) have to change some random setting in a file you've never heard about, which gets MSBuild printing stuff out via fucking OutputDebugString, leaving you to scrape through its (unreadable) output with DbgView until you find the magic message that hints at the file in question. (The link I have in my notes is http://blogs.msdn.com/b/vsproject/archive/2009/07/21/enable-...)
- If a solution refers to a non-existent project configuration, you get a cryptic "The parameter is incorrect" error when trying to build, with no clue as to what's wrong.
- If you happen to open one of the built-in MSBuild files in the text editor, which can easily happen if you click on the wrong warning, all hell breaks loose and MSBuild starts to spew warnings everywhere each time you build.
This excludes a few vendor-specific issues I had, with my favourite (I think...) being the plugin that would instantly terminate Visual Studio if you used the phrase "%(ProjectFilename)" (instead of "%(ProjectFileName)") in your build output paths.
Needless to say, after this dreadful experience - and I have to say that if you have never embarked on an endeavour such as this, you probably won't (as I didn't) appreciate just how long it can take, and how time-consuming it can be to track down and fix all these issues ocurring in all these opaque black boxes - I swore off VS2010 completely. And to this day, I have yet to use it in anger.
- VS2010's macro system is just broken, and fails to coexist with VS2008. Basic macros using the DTE object work; more sophisticated ones (I have a few that used DTE90 - or was it DTE80? - anyway, whatever, they manipulated project properties) seemed to be literally impossible to make work, due to some kind of conflict between system-global components that both try to install. Pretty shameful.
- VS2010+ craps massive files into your solution folder, worse even than the NCB palaver, and so your more junior and/or inept programmers will keep checking that junk into source control.
- It's common in VS2008 to change the build product name by going to the Linker or Librarian property page and just changing that Output File property. VS2010 doesn't like this, though, due to some MSBuild limitation, and would much prefer you to modify the settings in the General page, leaving the output file name as its default of something like "$(OutputFolder)$(OutputName)$(OutputExt)". Of course, the project upgrade doesn't actually do anything about this for you, so after importing all your projects that work the old way way, they won't work properly, and you have to fix each one up yourself.
- VS2010 dependencies aren't like VS2008 dependencies. There's a new C#-style References section that manages the linking. Dependencies can still be set, but they only affect build order. (Also - when you change dependencies, you need to close and restart Visual Studio, because sometimes they don't take effect properly.)
- The new C#-style references are part of the project, not part of the solution, so they come with the project when you add it into a solution. Add a project but forget its references and you just get a cryptic error (along the lines of "Project has no Debug|Win32 configuration") when you try to build; to add insult to injury, when you go to the References page, the missing reference is not actually shown, because (of course...) it's not in the solution. You need to open the vcxproj in a text editor and look at its contents and compare it to the references VS2010 shows you to work out which is missing.
- When a project refers to a non-existent file, the project will be considered permanently out of date. VS2010 won't give you any clue about what's wrong, and to track the problem down you (as I recall...) have to change some random setting in a file you've never heard about, which gets MSBuild printing stuff out via fucking OutputDebugString, leaving you to scrape through its (unreadable) output with DbgView until you find the magic message that hints at the file in question. (The link I have in my notes is http://blogs.msdn.com/b/vsproject/archive/2009/07/21/enable-...)
- If a solution refers to a non-existent project configuration, you get a cryptic "The parameter is incorrect" error when trying to build, with no clue as to what's wrong.
- If you happen to open one of the built-in MSBuild files in the text editor, which can easily happen if you click on the wrong warning, all hell breaks loose and MSBuild starts to spew warnings everywhere each time you build.
This excludes a few vendor-specific issues I had, with my favourite (I think...) being the plugin that would instantly terminate Visual Studio if you used the phrase "%(ProjectFilename)" (instead of "%(ProjectFileName)") in your build output paths.
Needless to say, after this dreadful experience - and I have to say that if you have never embarked on an endeavour such as this, you probably won't (as I didn't) appreciate just how long it can take, and how time-consuming it can be to track down and fix all these issues ocurring in all these opaque black boxes - I swore off VS2010 completely. And to this day, I have yet to use it in anger.
I just upgraded a VS2008 project to VS2010 and got a huge boost in compile times, worth it for that alone.
I think the improvements we'd get in Entity Framework performance, testing, and analysis would be well worth it.
> I think the improvements we'd get in Entity Framework performance
Technically, that's not a VS2012 or 2013 feature, that comes from .NET 4.5, which you can use with VS 2010.
However, the testing and analysis is well worth it. I don't know what your source control is, but paired with TFS 2012, it's a pretty large productivity improvement for my team over VS 2010 (as large as you can get from an IDE upgrade).
Technically, that's not a VS2012 or 2013 feature, that comes from .NET 4.5, which you can use with VS 2010.
However, the testing and analysis is well worth it. I don't know what your source control is, but paired with TFS 2012, it's a pretty large productivity improvement for my team over VS 2010 (as large as you can get from an IDE upgrade).
I'm using SVN for source control.
And I'm a little confused on the first part, because .NET 4.5 is not supported in Visual Studio 2010.
And I'm a little confused on the first part, because .NET 4.5 is not supported in Visual Studio 2010.
Man! If you're doing C++ then you definitely want to get onto 2012/2013 ASAP, the improvements in tooling are amazing. "Navigate to.." alone is worth it.
VS 2008 is the last one capable to compile the C++ to produce the binaries that can run on Windows 2000. Believe or not, I actually need that. That prevents me to use any C++ language changes introduced after VS 2008.
The frustrating part is that MS actually removed the existing code from the already existing libraries (but which are not binary interchangeable between the compiler versions) in order to disable the support for Windows 2000. Otherwise I'd be able to use even VS 2013. They did the same for XP with VS 2012, but more people made the fuss so now even VS 2013 should support XP, AFAIK.
The frustrating part is that MS actually removed the existing code from the already existing libraries (but which are not binary interchangeable between the compiler versions) in order to disable the support for Windows 2000. Otherwise I'd be able to use even VS 2013. They did the same for XP with VS 2012, but more people made the fuss so now even VS 2013 should support XP, AFAIK.
"MSDN Camp"[1] in its full glory.
[1]: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html
[1]: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html
That's "MSDN Magazine Camp". MSDN Magazine was a rag of a publication that was mostly just advertisements for 3rd party tools than it was anything interesting about programming. MSDN is the Microsoft Developer's Network, which houses basically all of their documentation, tutorials, articles, and support for developers.
Wow, a long article but still relevant. As I was reading this I realised how closely it matches even the latest metro ui fiasco (for developers). Indeed "MSDN Camp" has won. Thanks for the link!
Yea, MS even begin to remove references to old Windows versions from MSDN after they go out of support.
[deleted](3)
Cool :-)
Very nice. I really love 2012 and the 2013 RC was pretty solid as well. The step up from 2010 was the most pronounced, as 2012 just runs circles around 2010 in (albeit, my own anecdotal) performance.
Just gotta wait for an upgrade license of R# to go on sale, as R#7 isn't compatible with 2013 ;(
Just gotta wait for an upgrade license of R# to go on sale, as R#7 isn't compatible with 2013 ;(
For what it's worth, I got a 50% discount from them from buying R#7 so close to the R#8 release date (uninstalled 7, and mentioned in the "please tell us why" comments that it was just too expensive). May be worth a shot.
VS2012 took out installer projects (instead telling you to just use InstallShield), SQLCLR projects, was incompatible with Oleg Sych's T4 Toolbox plug-in, and had a colour-scheme in the TFS source browser that made my eyes want to bleed.
Every other VS upgrade has been comparatively painless. I can't say I'm excited to try VS2013.
Every other VS upgrade has been comparatively painless. I can't say I'm excited to try VS2013.
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.
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.
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).
For C++, I find VS rather lacking compared to Xcode (though that's a combination of the compiler being dumb and IntelliSense being poor).
> 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.
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.
Someone decided that it needs to pander to web monkeys instead of empowering users that have used VS for 10+ years.
Which it probably does, given the huge amount of development that is web-based these days. The market for Windows-based C# applications is shrinking by the day.
Which it probably does, given the huge amount of development that is web-based these days. The market for Windows-based C# applications is shrinking by the day.
> pander to web monkeys
Really? How exactly does VS2012 pander to "web monkeys" at the expense of others?
Really? How exactly does VS2012 pander to "web monkeys" at the expense of others?
It's not necessarily "monkeys", but, disturbingly, Microsoft developer tools are becoming more and more oriented towards "wizard-and-designer-clickety-clickery" type development.
There are a few exceptions to this rule (think EF Code-First), but that's a drop in the ocean.
There are a few exceptions to this rule (think EF Code-First), but that's a drop in the ocean.
If anything MS tools have moved away from clickety-clickery. That was something they were pretty much famous for back in 2008. MVC and EF are just a couple examples of moving away from this patter. This is nothing but imaginative revisionism.
Don't get me wrong, this type of thing drove me from the MS ecosystem a while ago now but they do move largely in the right direction, just too slowly for my tastes.
Don't get me wrong, this type of thing drove me from the MS ecosystem a while ago now but they do move largely in the right direction, just too slowly for my tastes.
Agreed - EF code-first, Nuget, and ASP.NET MVC in general are excellent steps in the right direction away from excessively tool-oriented / ultra-bundled / abstracty type things. The very dark days were pure ASP.NET web forms with controls, DataSets, DataTables, ClientScriptBlocks, and the like.
A lot of things in VS are wrappers around very well-documented CLI tools, e.g., svcutil, and I don't begrudge these tools for doing a lot of heavy lifting.
A lot of things in VS are wrappers around very well-documented CLI tools, e.g., svcutil, and I don't begrudge these tools for doing a lot of heavy lifting.
I kind of disagree with this sentiment. From my experience the tooling around editing source files (csharp, razor, javascript, css) has gotten a LOT of love in the past 2 years. You're probably correct in that more work has gone into web development use cases over traditional desktop software, but not much seems to have been added in terms of "visual" programming.
On the designer front I can think of Entity Framework designer and WWF designer, Build Template designer (or however this thing from TFS is called?) and possibly a couple more.
My biggest gripe are all kinds of wizards, most notably "New Project" ones. They do generate a lot of cruft I have to clean up later and pull way too many dependencies.
My biggest gripe are all kinds of wizards, most notably "New Project" ones. They do generate a lot of cruft I have to clean up later and pull way too many dependencies.
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.
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.
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.
Microsoft has always had "half-baked frameworks and class libraries".
I actually like MFC, but it never really got past the "good for a first cut" phase, IMO. Fortunately, I've never had to deal with .NET, and besides a little MFC, most of my work is on Linux these days.
I actually like MFC, but it never really got past the "good for a first cut" phase, IMO. Fortunately, I've never had to deal with .NET, and besides a little MFC, most of my work is on Linux these days.
All microsoft products are targeted at purchasing decision-makers.
Ya, I can't begin to tell you the number of times I have been made fun of by ___ text editor fanatics for using an IDE that has wizard clicky things/drag drop components etc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkDD03yeLnU things like this never help
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkDD03yeLnU things like this never help
>Microsoft developer tools are becoming more and more oriented towards "wizard-and-designer-clickety-clickery" type development.
Yeah, I'm so spoilt with all those wizards VS gives me for editing MSBuild targets...
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The powershell prompt to manage your nuget package dependencies on a project is pretty much the opposite of 'clickety' development. The F# interactive prompt, likewise.
MS have always done a good job of catering to a wide range of developer personas.
MS have always done a good job of catering to a wide range of developer personas.
Enterprise developer here. That wizard bullshit is 100% enterprise. It's horrible to use and only exists because most enterprisey programmers are too terrible to grasp more productive coding methods.
Still 100x better than digging through 100 pages of abstruse Java docs about AbstractProxyBeanDAOFactoryProxy.GenerateAbstractProxyBeanDAOFactoryAccessor though.
Still 100x better than digging through 100 pages of abstruse Java docs about AbstractProxyBeanDAOFactoryProxy.GenerateAbstractProxyBeanDAOFactoryAccessor though.
It's weird, because my experience of .NET enterprise development recently has been of people with Java-envy needlessly using Unity, and every other enterprisey framework they can get their hands on, for even small projects.
Closer to this: https://github.com/EnterpriseQualityCoding/FizzBuzzEnterpris... than drag and drop, clickety-click.
Closer to this: https://github.com/EnterpriseQualityCoding/FizzBuzzEnterpris... than drag and drop, clickety-click.
I felt that way when I switched from m.exe + cl.exe to Visual C++ but I eventually got over it. There's actually some pretty cool stuff happening at the lower levels, check out the "Going Native" stuff on Channel 9.
It's not necessarily "monkeys", but, disturbingly, Microsoft developer tools are becoming more and more oriented towards "wizard-and-designer-clickety-clickery" type development.
The term "wizard" came about because of the AppWizard and ClassWizard features in Visual C++.
Clickety-clickety has been a goal of Visual Studio since before it was Visual Studio.
The term "wizard" came about because of the AppWizard and ClassWizard features in Visual C++.
Clickety-clickety has been a goal of Visual Studio since before it was Visual Studio.
you are right. vs wizards were mostly limited to visual basic. now vs is vb.
"web monkeys"
Cute. Meanwhile you're the one developing in VS on Windows.
I don't think the comment was intended to be derogatory towards web programmers, so much as annoyed at the "you can create a website in an hour without writing a line of code" oriented features. Some of the web-oriented stuff in VS over the last several years seemed to be targeted towards mouse-oriented design of small web apps rather than more serious web programming. I do not think that is still the case, though I haven't really been paying attention.
FWIW, I can build an app in html5/javascript for every major desktop and mobile platform that runs "natively" on the host OS.
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Or maybe try Shimmer?
https://github.com/github/Shimmer
https://github.com/github/Shimmer
For installers, use http://wixtoolset.org/.
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.
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.
I gave it a shot for a day recently but found it way harder to use than InstallShield or NSIS. Part of it was probably the broken documentation where half the links just ended in nirvana. But I gave up when I learned you really have to add each single file one-by-one and the documentation even defended this as a feature.
You can use this Wix tool or command called Heat, which will automate the adding (and creating GUIDs) for a bunch of files. Really it's the underlying MSI target that's so painful, especially when you get into versioning. The OS wants to have detailed information on every file that is part of your installation. I think this is primarily for uninstallation purposes, but also for upgrades and who know what else. If I could get away with it, I'd just use NullSoft. It's like writing assembly, but it's so much simpler.
With Wix/MSI, there were certain executables that I could never get it to run as part of the install process. The XML would look the same as other execute commands that worked, but I could never figure out why they didn't run.
With Wix/MSI, there were certain executables that I could never get it to run as part of the install process. The XML would look the same as other execute commands that worked, but I could never figure out why they didn't run.
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Amen.
This can "kinda" be worked around with "heat.exe" (don't get me started on naming of tools in the toolchain), but even then you'll need to explicitly specify half a dozen command-line arguments (-ag -dr -cg -srd -scom -sreg -svb6 -sfrag) to make the thing work.
This can "kinda" be worked around with "heat.exe" (don't get me started on naming of tools in the toolchain), but even then you'll need to explicitly specify half a dozen command-line arguments (-ag -dr -cg -srd -scom -sreg -svb6 -sfrag) to make the thing work.
So how would one deal with projects that contain 1000s of files?
Run a script to enumerate the files and populate a wix file? Zip up the different parts and have the installation process unzip them?
Run a script to enumerate the files and populate a wix file? Zip up the different parts and have the installation process unzip them?
Don't mean to sound like an ass, but oh really?
WiX is a thin wrapper around MSI (which sucks beyond belief) and as such it suffers full blast from all the "design" decisions of the latter, not even trying to remedy the situation.
I really could pour out a full-blown rant on MSI in general and WiX in particular, but that would be wildly offtopic and of no interest to fellow HNers.
WiX is a thin wrapper around MSI (which sucks beyond belief) and as such it suffers full blast from all the "design" decisions of the latter, not even trying to remedy the situation.
I really could pour out a full-blown rant on MSI in general and WiX in particular, but that would be wildly offtopic and of no interest to fellow HNers.
If you think MSI is bad, and I'll have to take your word for it, what MS had prior to it was probably worse. Writing installers for Windows using MS tools has always been a nightmare.
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.
Wait, weren't you complaining about all the "wizard clickety clicky" things in another thread?
If you hate wizards, and you hate "obscure incantations", which I'm assuming means code, then what do you like? Do you program in natural language with voice recognition?
If you hate wizards, and you hate "obscure incantations", which I'm assuming means code, then what do you like? Do you program in natural language with voice recognition?
Where's the conflict?
By "obscure incantations" I mean having _three_ different syntaxes for string interpolation/variable substitution, providing _six_ command line arguments for the tool so that it does the one reasonable thing, having illogical rules in comparison operators, having to use a frickin' _bootstrapper_ to install prerequisites and not being able to chain MSIs, not being able to have a single installer for x86 and x64, not having a _simple_ way to define logic for "Back" button, yet having to write heavily nested XML to do simplest thing.
By "obscure incantations" I mean having _three_ different syntaxes for string interpolation/variable substitution, providing _six_ command line arguments for the tool so that it does the one reasonable thing, having illogical rules in comparison operators, having to use a frickin' _bootstrapper_ to install prerequisites and not being able to chain MSIs, not being able to have a single installer for x86 and x64, not having a _simple_ way to define logic for "Back" button, yet having to write heavily nested XML to do simplest thing.
The same can be said of programming in general.
It's true that msi is different from other installer builders, but it's for a reason. And if you have a concrete project you can build while following along with the wix tutorials and book, it's not difficult, it just takes some time.
It's true that msi is different from other installer builders, but it's for a reason. And if you have a concrete project you can build while following along with the wix tutorials and book, it's not difficult, it just takes some time.
Yeah, the "reason" being that Windows Installer was designed to support corporate deployment of applications to shared machines with install-on-demand and roaming profiles, and to support Windows 95 and up. This, and Microsoft's manic affection to backwards compatibility plus "architecture astronautery" (on-demand installs of COM objects, anyone) makes MSI a disaster.
The fault of WiX is that it's too thin of a wrapper.
The fault of WiX is that it's too thin of a wrapper.
I've always liked InnoSetup (http://www.jrsoftware.org/isinfo.php). You describe your installation in a short file created via its syntax-highlighting IDE. A big con is that its scripting is done in Pascal, but you can likely find existing scripts to do many common operations.
While that's obviously a solution, it's not quite the same y'know? There's a lot more skill overhead in learning that tool vs the comparative ease of the installer project.
Considering how thoroughly MS screwed the pooch on ClickOnce, I was genuinely surprised when they completely abandoned their working installer system.
Considering how thoroughly MS screwed the pooch on ClickOnce, I was genuinely surprised when they completely abandoned their working installer system.
What's wrong with ClickOnce? I've not used it from a developer's perspective, but Chrome's installation (which uses it) always seems smooth as butter.
For small things ClickOnce is fine, but it's a pain in the ass to automate. For example, there's no way to synchronize the 'version' of the installer with the version of the EXE it's installing. I had to hack[1] it so I could pull the version metadata off the EXE assembly and then force it into the XML of the project file where the ClickOnce settings are stored.
There's also no ability to publish the built installer outside of the UI- my build scripts had to build the /app.publish directory and then just copy the whole shebang to a network location for deployment. I'm not as upset about this being a separate step, but if they indeed allow you to configure and deploy the installer from within the UI why not expose an API to do it as well?
Overall I think ClickOnce is fine for internal, self-updating tools. It's worth noting, however, that I was inspired to create my workflow based on looking at what Github was doing with their windows client.
[1]: http://whazzing.com/blog/2013/04/11/automated-clickonce-buil...
There's also no ability to publish the built installer outside of the UI- my build scripts had to build the /app.publish directory and then just copy the whole shebang to a network location for deployment. I'm not as upset about this being a separate step, but if they indeed allow you to configure and deploy the installer from within the UI why not expose an API to do it as well?
Overall I think ClickOnce is fine for internal, self-updating tools. It's worth noting, however, that I was inspired to create my workflow based on looking at what Github was doing with their windows client.
[1]: http://whazzing.com/blog/2013/04/11/automated-clickonce-buil...
There's a lot of things wrong with ClickOnce. IIRC chrome's installer only uses clickonce as a bootstrapping mechanism for the _actual_ installer.
Problems:
* Can't choose installation path * No offline installation * Hard (impossible?) to use with a CDN.
Here's an example of how to turn a directory of precompiled binaries into a click once package using powershell:
https://gist.github.com/jonnii/2628150
My powershell isn't _great_, so forgive any powershell oddities, but notice how much you have to massage the output of the mage tools to actually get it to do what you want.
Problems:
* Can't choose installation path * No offline installation * Hard (impossible?) to use with a CDN.
Here's an example of how to turn a directory of precompiled binaries into a click once package using powershell:
https://gist.github.com/jonnii/2628150
My powershell isn't _great_, so forgive any powershell oddities, but notice how much you have to massage the output of the mage tools to actually get it to do what you want.
Or Advanced Installer's free edition if you're xml-challenged.
Is exception assistant still removed from Express edition? Yes? Put me back in
VS2013 is great, try it guys!
watch this (for web devs): http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Build/2013/3-503
Thought this was announcing a web version of VS.
If you need to justify upgrades I would recommend measuring build speed savings in teams - vs 2012 & vs 2013 build faster than 2010 in my findings.
Anecdote: for one C++ solution I work on (two projects, 300k SLOC)
VS2008: 5 min
VS2012: 15 min
VS2013 Preview: 10 min
I use VS2012 and I'm about to use VS2013 for .NET development, but our C++ project is stuck in VS2008.
VS2008: 5 min
VS2012: 15 min
VS2013 Preview: 10 min
I use VS2012 and I'm about to use VS2013 for .NET development, but our C++ project is stuck in VS2008.
C# solutions on the other hand builds way faster (in my experience).
VS 2010 is the last one I got for personal use. Not enamored with the changes in VS 2012, Windows 8.* nor the cyclical abandonment of APIs. Add in the increased license cost we face on all Microsoft products at work and any announcement from Redmond gets a "meh" from me.
VS 2013 adds fix-and-continue to x64 builds. That right there is enough for me.
Beyond that, though, I'd encourage you to at least look at VS 2012, get past the superficial changes, and look underneath. There were a lot of performance improvements in the GUI rendering that added up, and there were a lot of tweaks to project search and management that became indispensable to me shortly after launch.
Beyond that, though, I'd encourage you to at least look at VS 2012, get past the superficial changes, and look underneath. There were a lot of performance improvements in the GUI rendering that added up, and there were a lot of tweaks to project search and management that became indispensable to me shortly after launch.
Came here thinking VS2k13 was going to be free.
It sort of is - they have the Express Editions which are free:
http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/eng/downloads#d-2013-e...
http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/eng/downloads#d-2013-e...
Fully-integrated TypeScript support!
For me that elevates TypeScript from a MS side project to something they're serious about.
For me that elevates TypeScript from a MS side project to something they're serious about.
From their TypeScript blog post re: path to 1.0:
"There are now dozens of large applications written by teams in Microsoft, including Bing, Xbox, TFS, So.cl, as well as in projects such as Adobe Digital Publishing Suite for Windows 8.1, Zud.io, Away3D, and Turbulenz."
I think they've been pretty serious about it from the start due to the design decisions in Metro.
"There are now dozens of large applications written by teams in Microsoft, including Bing, Xbox, TFS, So.cl, as well as in projects such as Adobe Digital Publishing Suite for Windows 8.1, Zud.io, Away3D, and Turbulenz."
I think they've been pretty serious about it from the start due to the design decisions in Metro.
Anders is in charge of TypeScript. That alone should have been enough.
In VS 2012 MSFT removed the color for the icons in the UI. Everybody complained on the web. Now the color icons are back. MSFT's spin:
"Visual Studio 2013 includes many user interface improvements based on customer feedback and Microsoft’s core design principle of keeping the focus on the content to deliver an improved user experience. You may notice the more than 400 modified icons with greater differentiation and increased use of color,"
http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/eng/visual-studio-2013
"Visual Studio 2013 includes many user interface improvements based on customer feedback and Microsoft’s core design principle of keeping the focus on the content to deliver an improved user experience. You may notice the more than 400 modified icons with greater differentiation and increased use of color,"
http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/eng/visual-studio-2013
So they put it back and now people are unhappy a company didn't flat out say they made a bad decision? Spin is everywhere, startups seem worse than others. Every day there's something on the HN front page that's going to revolutionize and disrupt the internet...
No, I'm unhappy that they kept the capitals in menus(!) like "FILE" "EDIT" "VIEW" "PROJECT" "BUILD" even though there were enough complaints about these too. I'm also unhappy there's no real Start menu back in W8.1.
At least this one is trivial to fix: http://stackoverflow.com/a/17413002/60188
> based on customer feedback
Sounds about right to me. Why is this "spin"?
Sounds about right to me. Why is this "spin"?
Because from the very beginning, way before 2012 was released, customers hated the move and criticized it. Microsoft insisted "Metro" was cool and we had to like it, that they weren't icons, but glyphs, and glyphs don't use color.
Instead of just admitting up-front their redesign was pretty hated and promising to fix it, they insist it's great until they've changed it.
Instead of just admitting up-front their redesign was pretty hated and promising to fix it, they insist it's great until they've changed it.
Your arguing semantics. "Customer Feedback" is all thats needed. Stop hating and go download it!
Thanks for your uselessly dramatic comment.
I can't seem to find the dmg for mac.
It's probably on apple's homepage in the same section for the iOS windows dev tools. Please share the link when you find it.
I think it's on the same page as the .deb and .rpm files.
"Please install Internet Explorer 10 and then retry installing Visual Studio"
Internet Explorer 10 also insists on Windows 7 SP1 installation. I'm using this Win7 install since 2009. I'm very scared the update will jinx it.
Internet Explorer 10 also insists on Windows 7 SP1 installation. I'm using this Win7 install since 2009. I'm very scared the update will jinx it.
That's such a horrible practice I don't even.
You're forcing yourself to stay on an older, potentially less maintained version of the OS so you don't "jinx it"?
You're forcing yourself to stay on an older, potentially less maintained version of the OS so you don't "jinx it"?
The VS.NET installer has gotten a lot less terrible since the 2005/2008 days, although it used to be pretty dicey. One may now upgrade with little to no fear of a nightmarishly borked install state... that said, it's wise to use VMs exclusively for development, so rolling back to a pre-update snapshot is an option.
I heard many complaints about SP1 slow starting and getting stuck in 'Shutting Down'. On top of that SP1 has zero new features. Bunch of so called security updates. From my perpective i'm using the stable version.
If thing go awry i would need to waste a day or two reinstalling the OS again. It's very easy to resist installing this update.
If thing go awry i would need to waste a day or two reinstalling the OS again. It's very easy to resist installing this update.
Zero new features is not true. AVX support for newer processors is one new feature. But more importantly Win7 RTM support ended April 2013.
And finally we should be able to see function return values in debugger:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudioalm/archive/2013/06/27/s...
You could see this in the Autos window in earlier versions, too. Although maybe only immediately after shift-F11'ing out of a function, and not of multiple levels of function calls like the linked article shows.
That's a great feature which will actually help avoid creating local bindings just to easily see the value.
I had the preview installed, and I had really grown to love the navigation bar for Javascript.
After installing the professional edition from MSDN... my navigation bars are gone. WTF?
After installing the professional edition from MSDN... my navigation bars are gone. WTF?
I got a free copy of 2010 by attending a launch event, and 2012 from the (now defunct) websitespark program. Anyone know of any freebies for 2013?
one cool freebie imho is "PTVS-Integrated". it's VisualStudio 2013 + Python Tools bundled together. It's perpetually free.
link: http://pytools.codeplex.com
video overview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNNAOypc6Ek
(disclaimer, etc).
(disclaimer, etc).
Is it available on DreamSpark yet? There's a link to DreamSpark on the download page, but it takes you to the RC, which has been out for a while.
There's no link to DreamSpark on the download page [1]
[1] http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/eng#downloads
[1] http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/eng#downloads
I can see a banner about halfway down linking to DreamSpark. They still only have the RC, but apparently the final version will be available on the 31st.
Imagine one day you can just loan Windows Azure server and launches a build when you click a button on VS web edition. I think that's an attractive feature. Or pair programming on web over VS with co-workers.
> people use this
> what
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 cool features that goes into it. The new VS2013 feature that shows how often a function is referenced is useful. I don't get that in ST2 and probably never will. But I've used VS enough that I've become philosophically opposed to it and other similar IDEs. The core of the problem for me was that all the fancy wizards and project templates are not maintainable for MS. There were a number of times I was using some new project type introduced in a version of VS only to find the template was incompatible in the next version (e.g. reporting in 2005). This inevitably lead to a lot of unexpected work when my team would upgrade. Many of the productivity wizards impose hidden debt on their users.
Another major gripe was that VS would get really sludgy for solutions with a great number of projects/files. Take note that whenever you see MS demo a hot new feature, it's always with a very simple solution. Also, VS would block for me a lot, but that was probably due using too many plugins. I'd find that an application freeze of even 2 seconds would distract me. Not an issue I face now with a text editor + repl.
</rant>