Long Live Visual Studio
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I have been of the opinion that VS is MSs best product so far, for a long time now. Love it.
It really is.
Check out my IoT graphics library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx And my IoT UI/User Experience library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
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Visual Studio is one of the main reasons that Windows is my primary when it comes to development. Between that and the unfortunately named VS Code, Microsoft has absolutely nailed it when it comes to big ticket developer tools - specifically IDEs and editors. There's a lot to dislike about Microsoft, but their dev tools have always been better than the rest of the industry. Fite me. (Their C++ compiler, not so much, but that's a different ball of wax)
Check out my IoT graphics library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx And my IoT UI/User Experience library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
honey the codewitch wrote:
Their C++ compiler, not so much, but that's a different ball of wax
I have PTSD from my MS-DOS days and the whimsical changes the Microsoft C 6.0 'Optimizing' compiler would make in handling values marked as
volatile. The final solution was to turn optimization completely off, optimize by hand where able, re-code in assembly language where necessary, and benchmark the :elephant: out of it during the process.Software Zen:
delete this; -
honey the codewitch wrote:
Their C++ compiler, not so much, but that's a different ball of wax
I have PTSD from my MS-DOS days and the whimsical changes the Microsoft C 6.0 'Optimizing' compiler would make in handling values marked as
volatile. The final solution was to turn optimization completely off, optimize by hand where able, re-code in assembly language where necessary, and benchmark the :elephant: out of it during the process.Software Zen:
delete this;And the optimizer wasn't very good, in the first place. The 80(2)86 instruction set had too many special cases for the MS compiler optimizer to handle properly. Only with the more orthogonal 80386 instruction set did MS's optimizer start doing a good job. It was not unusual in those days to take C code, recode the same algorithm in x86 Assembly Language, and get 1-2 orders of magnitude better performance.
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows. -- 6079 Smith W.
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And the optimizer wasn't very good, in the first place. The 80(2)86 instruction set had too many special cases for the MS compiler optimizer to handle properly. Only with the more orthogonal 80386 instruction set did MS's optimizer start doing a good job. It was not unusual in those days to take C code, recode the same algorithm in x86 Assembly Language, and get 1-2 orders of magnitude better performance.
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows. -- 6079 Smith W.
Daniel Pfeffer wrote:
The 80(2)86 instruction set had too many special cases for the MS compiler optimizer to handle properly. Only with the more orthogonal 80386 instruction set did MS's optimizer start doing a good job.
I never knew that, 30 years ago working on this stuff :-D.
Software Zen:
delete this; -
Visual Studio is one of the main reasons that Windows is my primary when it comes to development. Between that and the unfortunately named VS Code, Microsoft has absolutely nailed it when it comes to big ticket developer tools - specifically IDEs and editors. There's a lot to dislike about Microsoft, but their dev tools have always been better than the rest of the industry. Fite me. (Their C++ compiler, not so much, but that's a different ball of wax)
Check out my IoT graphics library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx And my IoT UI/User Experience library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
honey the codewitch wrote:
Visual Studio is one of the main reasons that Windows is my primary when it comes to development.
I'd go as far as to saying Visual Studio is one of the main reasons why Windows is still alive and kicking today. What makes Windows survive is not the OS itself, but the gazillion of applications covering every imaginable field. MS makes only a tiny little fraction of this software. But they make Visual Studio, enabling millions of software developers to create programs. The essential aspect: With VS, you can develop software without being a full time geek, you can be a part time programmer and part time domain expert, in the application domain. So you know what the needs are, the problems, the work patterns, the terminology. Your coworkers feel at home in your solutions. And you eat your own dog food. You see the same with other major operating system - in a single application domain: Software development. The geeks know the needs, problems, work patterns and terminology of software geeks. So they embrace the geeky development tools. Users in other domains do not. We pay the price by having to accept that solutions are made with Visual Basic rather than as regex-es. That file names contain spaces and non-ascii characters, rather than teaching users six different ways to quote or escape non-ASCII characters. We, the true software developers, have lost our hegemony to people who don't know what is meant by closure or lambda expressions, but who know the issues handled by the real end users of the software, programming their Visual Basic according to that. We may lament the deterioration of advanced programming techniques (and shift to a different OS and development environment), but if you want computers to save the world, you far more need people to understand the world than people who completely understands lambdas, closures, virtual functions and multiple inheritance.
Religious freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make five.
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A few days ago, Code Witch expressed a rather low opinion of the Eclipse IDE. And someone commented that they think Visual Studio is very good. Well I can say that I'm liking Visual Studio because I just moved a file from one folder to another by dragging it, and upon dropping the file, it asked me if I wanted it to adjust the namespaces for the classes inside the file! Nothing could have been more appropriate or helpful at the time. Viva La Visual Studio!
The difficult we do right away... ...the impossible takes slightly longer.
VS has existed for a few decades now, you'd *hope* it would be pretty good by now. The problem with VS as I see it is that they keep throwing in new features, but long-standing bugs remain. Frankly I'd rather have MS spend a few months doing nothing but addressing known issues, with no new feature, to bring everything up to speed...and maybe then go back to adding new features.
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honey the codewitch wrote:
Visual Studio is one of the main reasons that Windows is my primary when it comes to development.
I'd go as far as to saying Visual Studio is one of the main reasons why Windows is still alive and kicking today. What makes Windows survive is not the OS itself, but the gazillion of applications covering every imaginable field. MS makes only a tiny little fraction of this software. But they make Visual Studio, enabling millions of software developers to create programs. The essential aspect: With VS, you can develop software without being a full time geek, you can be a part time programmer and part time domain expert, in the application domain. So you know what the needs are, the problems, the work patterns, the terminology. Your coworkers feel at home in your solutions. And you eat your own dog food. You see the same with other major operating system - in a single application domain: Software development. The geeks know the needs, problems, work patterns and terminology of software geeks. So they embrace the geeky development tools. Users in other domains do not. We pay the price by having to accept that solutions are made with Visual Basic rather than as regex-es. That file names contain spaces and non-ascii characters, rather than teaching users six different ways to quote or escape non-ASCII characters. We, the true software developers, have lost our hegemony to people who don't know what is meant by closure or lambda expressions, but who know the issues handled by the real end users of the software, programming their Visual Basic according to that. We may lament the deterioration of advanced programming techniques (and shift to a different OS and development environment), but if you want computers to save the world, you far more need people to understand the world than people who completely understands lambdas, closures, virtual functions and multiple inheritance.
Religious freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make five.
trønderen wrote:
I'd go as far as to saying Visual Studio is one of the main reasons why Windows is still alive and kicking today.
In the dev community yes, for the more general audience, I consider two major reasons for it's popularity. 1. PC gaming support. 2. It being hardware agnostic, allowing people to build relatively economical machines hence making it more accessible.
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It could be much more appropriate to ask this in the middle of the dragging, and remove the file completely, if you refuse.
That doesn't make any sense at all. If you're in the middle of dragging, then VS can't possibly know where you intend to drop it. And interrupting a drag and drop operation by displaying a modal message box would be extremely bad form.
The difficult we do right away... ...the impossible takes slightly longer.
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VS has existed for a few decades now, you'd *hope* it would be pretty good by now. The problem with VS as I see it is that they keep throwing in new features, but long-standing bugs remain. Frankly I'd rather have MS spend a few months doing nothing but addressing known issues, with no new feature, to bring everything up to speed...and maybe then go back to adding new features.
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VS has existed for a few decades now, you'd *hope* it would be pretty good by now. The problem with VS as I see it is that they keep throwing in new features, but long-standing bugs remain. Frankly I'd rather have MS spend a few months doing nothing but addressing known issues, with no new feature, to bring everything up to speed...and maybe then go back to adding new features.
It's all about marketability and trying to be seen as relevant. There's no marketing value in fixing problems that should have been fixed long ago, but there is in trumpeting "new features". Something I noted about C# -- each new release has 5% or 10% of the new features that are actually useful. The remainder is marketing and the C# dev team ensuring their next paycheck.
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A few days ago, Code Witch expressed a rather low opinion of the Eclipse IDE. And someone commented that they think Visual Studio is very good. Well I can say that I'm liking Visual Studio because I just moved a file from one folder to another by dragging it, and upon dropping the file, it asked me if I wanted it to adjust the namespaces for the classes inside the file! Nothing could have been more appropriate or helpful at the time. Viva La Visual Studio!
The difficult we do right away... ...the impossible takes slightly longer.
I used the predecessor of Visual Studio, 16-bit Visual C++ 1.0 with MFC 2.0, back in 93. Before that it was MS C/C++ ver 7, and Turbo Pascal. IMHO, VC++ 6.0 which came later was such an excellent IDE to live and work in. These days, working in VS2017, having gone thru all those versions, I miss some things. VS2008 is still a fav, the way the child windows work is much more productive than later versions. Yes, I'm old.
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A few days ago, Code Witch expressed a rather low opinion of the Eclipse IDE. And someone commented that they think Visual Studio is very good. Well I can say that I'm liking Visual Studio because I just moved a file from one folder to another by dragging it, and upon dropping the file, it asked me if I wanted it to adjust the namespaces for the classes inside the file! Nothing could have been more appropriate or helpful at the time. Viva La Visual Studio!
The difficult we do right away... ...the impossible takes slightly longer.
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I used the predecessor of Visual Studio, 16-bit Visual C++ 1.0 with MFC 2.0, back in 93. Before that it was MS C/C++ ver 7, and Turbo Pascal. IMHO, VC++ 6.0 which came later was such an excellent IDE to live and work in. These days, working in VS2017, having gone thru all those versions, I miss some things. VS2008 is still a fav, the way the child windows work is much more productive than later versions. Yes, I'm old.
I remember using Turbo Pascal rev 1.0 on an Osborne "luggable." What a joy that everything fit on the double-density upgraded 180K (I think it was) floppy! Even better that I could open the floppy drive & remove the disk so that any bugs (yes, there were a few....) in the switch-the-memory-bank-to-access-some-hardware code had issues.
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It's all about marketability and trying to be seen as relevant. There's no marketing value in fixing problems that should have been fixed long ago, but there is in trumpeting "new features". Something I noted about C# -- each new release has 5% or 10% of the new features that are actually useful. The remainder is marketing and the C# dev team ensuring their next paycheck.
BryanFazekas wrote:
There's no marketing value in fixing problems that should have been fixed long ago, but there is in trumpeting "new features".
I'm not entirely disagreeing - VS, despite its warts and all, is still the best at what it does. But imagine the amount of goodwill they'd get if only a group of people were assigned the menial task of fixing known issues.
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I remember using Turbo Pascal rev 1.0 on an Osborne "luggable." What a joy that everything fit on the double-density upgraded 180K (I think it was) floppy! Even better that I could open the floppy drive & remove the disk so that any bugs (yes, there were a few....) in the switch-the-memory-bank-to-access-some-hardware code had issues.
Turbo Pascal was such a pleasure. Now I use C# and thank Anders Hejlsberg for both. Kinda funny I started my coding career and will be ending it with two of his inventions.
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BryanFazekas wrote:
There's no marketing value in fixing problems that should have been fixed long ago, but there is in trumpeting "new features".
I'm not entirely disagreeing - VS, despite its warts and all, is still the best at what it does. But imagine the amount of goodwill they'd get if only a group of people were assigned the menial task of fixing known issues.
dandy72 wrote:
But imagine the amount of goodwill they'd get if only a group of people were assigned the menial task of fixing known issues.
You're preaching to the choir ... I've been on a few projects where similar decisions were made ... didn't understand it then, don't understand it now.
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A few days ago, Code Witch expressed a rather low opinion of the Eclipse IDE. And someone commented that they think Visual Studio is very good. Well I can say that I'm liking Visual Studio because I just moved a file from one folder to another by dragging it, and upon dropping the file, it asked me if I wanted it to adjust the namespaces for the classes inside the file! Nothing could have been more appropriate or helpful at the time. Viva La Visual Studio!
The difficult we do right away... ...the impossible takes slightly longer.
I started with a Apple /// and basic not sure I had a IDE Moved to Microsoft and obtained a copy of Visual Basic 6 Professional new in the box for $50.00 all I knew was that was a great price So when support went away for VB 6 I wanted to write for Windows with JavaFX Only two IDE's were NetBeans and Eclipse. Had two computers so Eclipse on one and NetBeans on the other. Learning curve with Eclipse was steep compared to NetBeans JavaFX was abandoned by a company I despise Oracle Moved on to Visual Studio 2019 what a joy other than all the junk it puts in my Temp folder it has YES been a joy to use. Multiple platform support FREE on my OLD OS Windows 7 64bit
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dandy72 wrote:
VS has existed for a few decades now, you'd hope it would be pretty good by now.
I like VS. Better than other IDEs that I have tried. But VI has existed since 1970. I keep hoping but it remains miserable.
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A few days ago, Code Witch expressed a rather low opinion of the Eclipse IDE. And someone commented that they think Visual Studio is very good. Well I can say that I'm liking Visual Studio because I just moved a file from one folder to another by dragging it, and upon dropping the file, it asked me if I wanted it to adjust the namespaces for the classes inside the file! Nothing could have been more appropriate or helpful at the time. Viva La Visual Studio!
The difficult we do right away... ...the impossible takes slightly longer.
I agree 100%. I have used the MS development IDE since they introduced it in Visual Basic in 1991, then forward into Visual Studio for .NET around 2000. The main thing VS needs is a visual designer functionally on par with the existing one for WinForms (which dates back to VB in the 90s and updated well over the years) to bring that same rapid application development (i.e. drag and drop UI building) to MAUI, WinUI3, and Blazor. Components like "Hot Reload" don't even come close to improving the productivity and quality of the UI like a visual designer does. Without visual designers, just how "Visual" is Visual Studio?
