Is anyone else considering skipping the VS2008 generation?
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Some years ago Visual Studio was the best in class tool. Nowadays I love using Eclipse for Java or SharpDevelop for .NET development because VS2005 never ran smoothly. Every part of it is slow compared to Eclipse.
Buy a faster workstation? :-D
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martin_hughes wrote:
Is anyone else considering skipping the VS2008 generation? Or becoming a late adopter?
I'm jumping in. The CLR is still at Version 2.0, it is just the C# compiler (3.0) and .NET Framework (3.5) that are the big changes. VS2008 also has support for multiple versions of the framework, so I can ditch VS2005 yet still work on .NET 2.0 applications.
martin_hughes wrote:
Although there's a lot of cool stuff in .Net 3.5 I can't help but feel that I haven't done .Net 2.0 to death yet.
.NET 3.0 and 3.5 are both additive. They do not change what exists in .NET 2.0. So you still have a chance to do .NET 2.0 to death, although I personally wouldn't restrict myself. The LINQ stuff alone is enough for me to want to upgrade. LINQ is just a few extra classes and some compiler trickery.
martin_hughes wrote:
Also, given the amount of stuff currently coming out of Microsoft, I do wonder whether it's best to wait and see what falls by the wayside
There is a lot I'm waiting to see where it is going first. But for things like WCF I can see immediate advantages. WPF and Silverlight I think will make it, but I'm waiting a bit before I completely jump in on those. WF (Workflow Foundation) is the thing that no one really seems to talk about but is actually quite powerful - Things like the Web Client Software Factory use it.
martin_hughes wrote:
it wouldn't be the first time I've devoted effort to learning something only to see the marketability of such skills divebomb into obscurity.
Been there, done that, then I re-entered the MS world and I've been fairly safe ever since.
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Colin Angus Mackay wrote:
I'm jumping in. The CLR is still at Version 2.0, it is just the C# compiler (3.0) and .NET Framework (3.5) that are the big changes. VS2008 also has support for multiple versions of the framework, so I can ditch VS2005 yet still work on .NET 2.0 applications.
That's the main reason I plan to upgrade to VS2008 as soon as possible. Multi-targeting should have been included in VS2005 in my opinion...
If you truly believe you need to pick a mobile phone that "says something" about your personality, don't bother. You don't have a personality. A mental illness, maybe - but not a personality. - Charlie Brooker My Blog - My Photos - ScrewTurn Wiki
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Buy a faster workstation? :-D
In previous versions Eclipse was slow and VS was fast. Now it is vice versa, which is another hint, that the Java IDEs made a great leap forward while MS did not do their job well. It is the same with SQL Server Management Studio: While having some nice new functions it is so bloated that it annoys me whenever I use it. And my machine is not too bad (Pentium D 2,8GHz with 2GB RAM) Both .NET and Java have its Pros and Cons but today it makes more fun to code with Eclipse and Java then with VS2005 and .NET. Therefore I will skip VS2008 and concentrate on OpenSource J2EE. But as soon as .NET will again be more fun to use I may be changing sides again ;)
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Or becoming a late adopter? Although there's a lot of cool stuff in .Net 3.5 I can't help but feel that I haven't done .Net 2.0 to death yet. Also, given the amount of stuff currently coming out of Microsoft, I do wonder whether it's best to wait and see what falls by the wayside, for instance WPF - from what I've seen people on CodeProject do with it it looks very cool... but it wouldn't be the first time I've devoted effort to learning something only to see the marketability of such skills divebomb into obscurity.
Me: Can you see the "up" arrow? User:Errr...ummm....no. Me: Can you see an arrow that points upwards? User: Oh yes, I see it now! -Excerpt from a support call taken by me, 08/31/2007
My main development is in unmanaged C++ (not using MFC) - I'm still pretty happy with VS2003 - there's not much to attract a C++ developer to later versions - more features in the debugger, checked iterators in STL. In addition, my main development machine runs Windows 2000, so can't actually run VS2008 - there's another good reason :-O.
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I'll be jumping right in. I don't see how WPF could fall away, because it's driving the user experience in a way that's a huge leap from what we have now. If they client can see it, and they want it, then it will survive. Even if parts of WPF are a total disaster right now.
Christian Graus - Microsoft MVP - C++ "also I don't think "TranslateOneToTwoBillion OneHundredAndFortySevenMillion FourHundredAndEightyThreeThousand SixHundredAndFortySeven()" is a very good choice for a function name" - SpacixOne ( offering help to someone who really needed it ) ( spaces added for the benefit of people running at < 1280x1024 )
Christian Graus wrote:
because it's driving the user experience in a way that's a huge leap from what we have now
Huge leap for the developers or the users? I haven't seen any real world WPF apps that are significantly more usable than other apps. Actually, I haven't seen any real world WPF apps period. Be interested in knowing about a few.
regards, Paul Watson Ireland & South Africa
Andy Brummer wrote:
Watson's law: As an online discussion of cars grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving the Bugatti Veyron approaches one.
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My main development is in unmanaged C++ (not using MFC) - I'm still pretty happy with VS2003 - there's not much to attract a C++ developer to later versions - more features in the debugger, checked iterators in STL. In addition, my main development machine runs Windows 2000, so can't actually run VS2008 - there's another good reason :-O.
FYI, there's a bunch of new features in the C++ libraries shipped with VS2008. In addition, if you're supporting Vista, the corresponding PSDK won't even integrate with VS2003. :doh:
Anna :rose: Linting the day away :cool: Anna's Place | Tears and Laughter "If mushy peas are the food of the devil, the stotty cake is the frisbee of God"
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FYI, there's a bunch of new features in the C++ libraries shipped with VS2008. In addition, if you're supporting Vista, the corresponding PSDK won't even integrate with VS2003. :doh:
Anna :rose: Linting the day away :cool: Anna's Place | Tears and Laughter "If mushy peas are the food of the devil, the stotty cake is the frisbee of God"
Anna-Jayne Metcalfe wrote:
if you're supporting Vista
:laugh: - we (the company I work for) might move to XP from 2000 in the next year or two. We did actually move to Windows 2000 (from 95) quite rapidly after it was released - before XP was around, IIRC! But of course, there were positive benefits for the IT department - Win2k let them have control, unlike Win95. XP, on the other hand, doesn't have anything like that sort of benefit - for them!
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Or becoming a late adopter? Although there's a lot of cool stuff in .Net 3.5 I can't help but feel that I haven't done .Net 2.0 to death yet. Also, given the amount of stuff currently coming out of Microsoft, I do wonder whether it's best to wait and see what falls by the wayside, for instance WPF - from what I've seen people on CodeProject do with it it looks very cool... but it wouldn't be the first time I've devoted effort to learning something only to see the marketability of such skills divebomb into obscurity.
Me: Can you see the "up" arrow? User:Errr...ummm....no. Me: Can you see an arrow that points upwards? User: Oh yes, I see it now! -Excerpt from a support call taken by me, 08/31/2007
We will not be adopting VS2008 for a long time - there simply isn't a business a case for it. We are still using .NET 1.1 on many of our bespoke applications and are migrating these over to .NET 2.0 which is probably as far as we will go. It would be nice to have all the new toys however we have several enterprise wide systems in place (SAP, BEA Aqualogic Portal etc) as such VS2008/.NET 3.0/3.5 is simply not an option and will not be for a long time. I think this is a reality Microsoft needs to start understanding, why should we upgrade to the next xyz application, introduce more bugs, support headache etc when we are running stable with the current release of the app(s)? Adios, Fz
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unless I jump projects late/never adoptor. I currently need both NT4 and win2k support. The former is holding me back to VS03, and IIRC the later will continue to hold me at VS05 even after the client finishes retiring it's most antiquidated hardware.
-- If you view money as inherently evil, I view it as my duty to assist in making you more virtuous.
As a purely C++ programmer the .NET improvements etc. are not of interest. What will be of interest will be if they have finally implemented intellisense in a way that works more than occasionally. Typically I would wait until at least the first service pack before looking. I had not realised VS08 will not support win2K. That would definitely keep me off it for some years as many users still have it. At the end of the day you can push users so fast but you have to keep supporting the platforms a majority are using.
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As a purely C++ programmer the .NET improvements etc. are not of interest. What will be of interest will be if they have finally implemented intellisense in a way that works more than occasionally. Typically I would wait until at least the first service pack before looking. I had not realised VS08 will not support win2K. That would definitely keep me off it for some years as many users still have it. At the end of the day you can push users so fast but you have to keep supporting the platforms a majority are using.
C++ might, as .net programmer I haven't really paid much attention on that end, but unless MS has changed its mind and backported it, the new framework will only support XP forward.
-- If you view money as inherently evil, I view it as my duty to assist in making you more virtuous.
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C++ might, as .net programmer I haven't really paid much attention on that end, but unless MS has changed its mind and backported it, the new framework will only support XP forward.
-- If you view money as inherently evil, I view it as my duty to assist in making you more virtuous.
Ah. So it is principally an issue that you cannot download the .NET framework for earlier OS versions. That is always an issue with applications that rely on some kind of installed library. I imagine the C++ support will depend on which libraries and OS facilities are used. Much as I can still build an app that will run on win98 as long as unicode is not used.
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Or becoming a late adopter? Although there's a lot of cool stuff in .Net 3.5 I can't help but feel that I haven't done .Net 2.0 to death yet. Also, given the amount of stuff currently coming out of Microsoft, I do wonder whether it's best to wait and see what falls by the wayside, for instance WPF - from what I've seen people on CodeProject do with it it looks very cool... but it wouldn't be the first time I've devoted effort to learning something only to see the marketability of such skills divebomb into obscurity.
Me: Can you see the "up" arrow? User:Errr...ummm....no. Me: Can you see an arrow that points upwards? User: Oh yes, I see it now! -Excerpt from a support call taken by me, 08/31/2007
WPF and built-in unit testing are enough to get me to jump to VS 2008 when it comes out. But I'm not sure I'll be using other features of .NET 3.5, particularly LINQ.
David Veeneman www.veeneman.com
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I'd love to dive right in but the company I work for is almost completely web service based & hence I never get to work with WPF, Silverlight, LINQ or any other of the new features during my normal day to day routine. That said, however, I do plan to do a few projects for myself (even if they never see the light of day) just to stay current. That I'm mad about technology is a bonus :D
But fortunately we have the nanny-state politicians who can step in to protect us poor stupid consumers, most of whom would not know a JVM from a frozen chicken. Bruce Pierson
Because programming is an art, not a science. Marc Clifton -
Or becoming a late adopter? Although there's a lot of cool stuff in .Net 3.5 I can't help but feel that I haven't done .Net 2.0 to death yet. Also, given the amount of stuff currently coming out of Microsoft, I do wonder whether it's best to wait and see what falls by the wayside, for instance WPF - from what I've seen people on CodeProject do with it it looks very cool... but it wouldn't be the first time I've devoted effort to learning something only to see the marketability of such skills divebomb into obscurity.
Me: Can you see the "up" arrow? User:Errr...ummm....no. Me: Can you see an arrow that points upwards? User: Oh yes, I see it now! -Excerpt from a support call taken by me, 08/31/2007
I'm using VS2008 on a production project now and I'm very pleased (still using Winforms, not WPF). LINQ to SQL has a few oddities, but so does every ORM tool out there. Overall, our productivity with LINQ to SQL as the ORM tool has greatly increased, and now we're writing LINQ queries instead of waiting for some DBA to write a simple stored procedure for us. I'd say that makes the switch worth it. Nothing out there is perfect, but don't be afraid of something out there just because it's new or different.
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Or becoming a late adopter? Although there's a lot of cool stuff in .Net 3.5 I can't help but feel that I haven't done .Net 2.0 to death yet. Also, given the amount of stuff currently coming out of Microsoft, I do wonder whether it's best to wait and see what falls by the wayside, for instance WPF - from what I've seen people on CodeProject do with it it looks very cool... but it wouldn't be the first time I've devoted effort to learning something only to see the marketability of such skills divebomb into obscurity.
Me: Can you see the "up" arrow? User:Errr...ummm....no. Me: Can you see an arrow that points upwards? User: Oh yes, I see it now! -Excerpt from a support call taken by me, 08/31/2007
We just got our developers started with VS2005 and I personally would prefer to stick with a stable known platform like .Net 2.0 then to keep chaising the promise of improved developer productivity in a new product. Give me productivity enhancing features that I can use when maintaining code I've already written. There's no ROI for rewritting our whole application portfolio for the latest tool. Microsoft is really falling short lately in delivering value to customers. Just look at Vista, Office 2007 and Exchange 2007. Lot's of wiz-bang but short on value. We want tools that let us leverage our experience not tools that we need to completely relearn every few years. Maybe it is time to switch to Linux.
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Or becoming a late adopter? Although there's a lot of cool stuff in .Net 3.5 I can't help but feel that I haven't done .Net 2.0 to death yet. Also, given the amount of stuff currently coming out of Microsoft, I do wonder whether it's best to wait and see what falls by the wayside, for instance WPF - from what I've seen people on CodeProject do with it it looks very cool... but it wouldn't be the first time I've devoted effort to learning something only to see the marketability of such skills divebomb into obscurity.
Me: Can you see the "up" arrow? User:Errr...ummm....no. Me: Can you see an arrow that points upwards? User: Oh yes, I see it now! -Excerpt from a support call taken by me, 08/31/2007
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Ah. So it is principally an issue that you cannot download the .NET framework for earlier OS versions. That is always an issue with applications that rely on some kind of installed library. I imagine the C++ support will depend on which libraries and OS facilities are used. Much as I can still build an app that will run on win98 as long as unicode is not used.
basically yes. You can download it, but it won't work because it's too tightly coupled to the win32 api. Even if you don't use the parts that require XP+ APIs the framework still does and you're screwed. In theory you could use a 3rd party .net to native compiler to make a win32 exe that would work on older hardware (provided you watch your API usage), but the software to do that is priced similarly to VS itself so I've never actually tried to do so.
-- If you view money as inherently evil, I view it as my duty to assist in making you more virtuous.
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Or becoming a late adopter? Although there's a lot of cool stuff in .Net 3.5 I can't help but feel that I haven't done .Net 2.0 to death yet. Also, given the amount of stuff currently coming out of Microsoft, I do wonder whether it's best to wait and see what falls by the wayside, for instance WPF - from what I've seen people on CodeProject do with it it looks very cool... but it wouldn't be the first time I've devoted effort to learning something only to see the marketability of such skills divebomb into obscurity.
Me: Can you see the "up" arrow? User:Errr...ummm....no. Me: Can you see an arrow that points upwards? User: Oh yes, I see it now! -Excerpt from a support call taken by me, 08/31/2007
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unless I jump projects late/never adoptor. I currently need both NT4 and win2k support. The former is holding me back to VS03, and IIRC the later will continue to hold me at VS05 even after the client finishes retiring it's most antiquidated hardware.
-- If you view money as inherently evil, I view it as my duty to assist in making you more virtuous.
.NET 3.5 is a continuation of the bad naming policy of the .NET Framework. It does not contain a new CLR. The new features added to the existing .NET 2.0 classes are not going in new side-by-side assemblies, they are going in ".NET Framework 2.0 SP1". That's right, they're updating the assemblies in place. It overwrites the existing GAC copy of Framework 2.0 DLLs so it's not even possible to use configuration files to go back. Hello, DLL Hell. Similarly there are some updates to ".NET 3.0" in this release, which replace the existing DLLs. So where's the new stuff going? Most of the new Base Class Libraries are going in System.Core.dll. Microsoft have defined 'red bits' which can only change very carefully and 'green bits' which contain the new stuff. See here[^] for information on what's what. The much touted '.NET multi-targeting' is a bit of a blind, therefore, because it actually just governs which assemblies you can select to go into your project. It all runs on top of CLR 2.0.
DoEvents: Generating unexpected recursion since 1991 -
Colin Angus Mackay wrote:
I'm jumping in. The CLR is still at Version 2.0, it is just the C# compiler (3.0) and .NET Framework (3.5) that are the big changes. VS2008 also has support for multiple versions of the framework, so I can ditch VS2005 yet still work on .NET 2.0 applications.
That's the main reason I plan to upgrade to VS2008 as soon as possible. Multi-targeting should have been included in VS2005 in my opinion...
If you truly believe you need to pick a mobile phone that "says something" about your personality, don't bother. You don't have a personality. A mental illness, maybe - but not a personality. - Charlie Brooker My Blog - My Photos - ScrewTurn Wiki
VS2008 'multi-targeting' is a cheat. As Colin says, '.NET 3.0' and '.NET 3.5' still run on top of CLR 2.0. They share the same mscorlib.dll, System.dll, System.Windows.Forms.dll, etc. The '.NET 3.5' installer will download and install '.NET 3.0 SP1' and '.NET 2.0 SP1', which overwrite the existing assemblies in the GAC - no side-by-side here! VS2008 cannot target CLR 1.1, only CLR 2.0. To complicate things I believe .NET 2.0 SP1 will be downloadable separately and indeed become the supported version if Microsoft follow their normal support practices. So what does 'multi-targeting' really do? It restricts which assemblies you can reference and the code which is generated by default. It's a sham. Still, VS2008 on Vista should be better than 2005.
DoEvents: Generating unexpected recursion since 1991