Visual Studio 2010 - chunky but has a great personality Like Clerks director Kevin Smith, Visual Studio is a lot to get your arms around. There's a new editor and shell built with the graphics-rich Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), version 4.0 of the .NET Framework that itself is packed with new features. Plus, there are some big changes in the target project types, from C++ …
That would have been nice, wouldn't it? Unfortunately, no - apparently that didn't get enough votes on their connect site, so they decided to work on something more important instead.
To 'fix' the issue, the default platform for new projects is x86, not AnyCPU - so if you're on a 64 bit OS, and you just accept the defaults when creating a new project, then you create a 32 bit executable (which can be edit-and-continue debugged). If you want to edit and continue an actual 64 bit or AnyCPU (running on 64 bit OS) executable, then you are still out of luck.
It supports auto, rvalue references, static_assert, decltype and lambda.
http://blogs.msdn.com/vcblog/archive/2008/10/28/lambdas-auto-and-static-assert-c-0x-features-in-vc10-part-1.aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/vcblog/archive/2009/02/03/rvalue-references-c-0x-features-in-vc10-part-2.aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/vcblog/archive/2009/04/22/decltype-c-0x-features-in-vc10-part-3.aspx
As some who has moved from using Visual Studio 2003/Subversion to Visual Studio 2010/Team Foundation Server, I have to say that the current Beta is shocking. Really, really shocking. Opening a XAML file can take minutes, and there is 50/50 chance it will crash VS2010. The screen frequently corrupts completely - just a collection of random pixels as if they were writing directly to video memory (!), perhaps in an attempt to improve performance. Despite this, it is slooooooow. The integration with TFS is slow, and inconsistent, though I suspect that's as much the brain dead design of TFS (Off line working? Forget it!). Not a problem with VS, but why can I not access source control functionality from with Explorer?
The current VS2010 beta is slow and crash prone - more like an alpha than a beta - and TFS is a world of fail 'by design' forcing you to be on-line with the server to check things out. We learnt that was a crap idea over a decade ago, MS, please, get with the program!
VS 2010 is working great on my Windows 7 machine. It does everything I need to do. The performance is also very good. But I am a little disappointed that they didn't introduce the ribbon UI. The Office 2010 ribbon is so useful and simple that I've been spoiled. Now, I hate working with those old-fashioned and ugly menus and toolbars. Hopefully they will include ribbon in the next version of Visual Studio.
The Ribbon is the biggest UI improvement of the last 25 years. Only tabbed-browsing comes close to it. In Office 2010 the ribbon got even better. Now you can fully customize the ribbon. So I have all the commands that I use frequently grouped together logically in the home tab. This saves so many clicks that once you get used to it, there's no going back to the old menus/toolbars.
I sure hope it's not. Though I have no experience with 2010, the performance lost in moving from 2003 to 2008 is enough to make one want to pull their hair out waiting for VS to perform requested operation. That and it seems to lock it's own output files and stumble on itself during recompilation from time to time.
I sincerely would have hoped that the performance issues be addressed, but not from the sounds of it.
As the person responsible for setting up the versioning system for my team on the lab I work, I choose Subversion over TFS because I already had previous experience (coming from a *nix background) and we had a spare Linux box with some free space.
When another team which was using TFS saw versioning working correctly for us, without any corrpution specially when power went out (we still don't have a UPS, so...), the next project they had they set up a Subversion server and voila, it works.
Old farts like me will remember with fondness when the computer press would actually discuss and compare the code generation when reviewing development tools.
Ok, so VS2010 raises the bar on memory and CPU consumption, just like its predecessors did. But what about the output of VS2010? Are the users of the generated binaries similarly afflicted? Does VS2010 natively use newer CPU instruction sets (SSE4.x, AVX), or do you have explicitly put that support in the source code? Can a single copy of VS2010 generate both 32- and 64-bit binaries? Which runs faster, a x86 binary generated by 2010 or the same code compiled with Intel's ICC v11.1 compiler?
"The .NET Add Reference dialog, for example, now populates in a background thread, whereas it used to freeze the IDE for several seconds on first use in a session."
Great. Hopefully they've started following their own coding advice and kept the UI thread responsive. I very much enjoy waiting for a bit while the tooltip thing does whatever it's doing, just after I've started VS2008 and moved my mouse over some code.
The official line I heard when people asked about this was for existing WM6.x and below development, you should use existing tools (ie. VS2008 etc).
For Windows Phone 7 Series, they haven't formally announced what to use - but rumour has it it'll be Silverlight based, using VS2010.
If by mainline office software you mean Word, Excel or Powerpoint then I rather doubt it. .NET is technically incapable of hosting all the different kinds of COM components that native code can cope with, so whilst you could use (and they probably have done already) managed code for some of the bells and whistles, the "main frame" will always have to be native code.
Other possible drawbacks (at least from Microsoft's angle) might be that a managed version of Office might run under Mono, would necessarily expose much of its internals to code browsers in a way that native code doesn't, would probably result in a cleaner (and easier to emulate and be compatible with) version of the code and (worst of all) would be an enormous effort with no immediate deliverable benefit to customers.
Developers complain about legacy code but, really, any old code that is still around is precisely what keeps the company afloat whilst they try and write something new that is as successful.
I call bullshit. You can interact with all sorts of COM stuff using .NET. Sure there are possibly edge cases I am unaware of and it is not advised (for example) to use managed code + COM to add an extension to FileExplorer for example but i'm not convinced about "technically incapable".
As a person who hates the Ribbon, I would like say that there isn't anything inherently wrong with the ribbon, the problem is deciding to remove the underlying menu system.
The pain in Office apps is because people knew how to do something and now they can't do it without searching the ribbon. I'm sure that if the original menu system was still available, people would have had a much easier time adapting to the ribbon.
I found the new menu customization in VS 2010 harder to use than the previous versions have been. There seem to be a lot of people who don't know how to customize them and I don't think that will change.
"I wonder that with this new fabby development tool, MS might build some of its mainline office software using .Net..."
That will only happen in the version of history where documents don't exceed the length of five pages and excel tables contain only 200 cells. And printing those five pages can be done in less than a day and more than two hours.
Delphi or Ada could do it, but never .Net or Java.
In my case (C++ because .NET is too slow for image processing) I love how Qt's Creator IDE makes use of all 4 of my cores while compiling with cl. The MS compiler is clearly compute bound most of the time so I really do see a 4x improvement. I know there are some third party add-ons for VS, but I find that small is beautiful. The only thing I miss is the class browser, which I can live without.
Also interesting thing to know: how many third party tools are broken and will take a year or so to be updated for the new IDE? I avoid using such kits if possible because of this issue.
"Not one comment about the post's cover girl's jubblies? What has the IT world come to!!!!!"
I just hadn't seen the main page of the Reg yet. When I did, WOW! YUM! Yes! You got my attention! I was rather annoyed to find that there was no further picture, but some lovely commentard tells me thats a fair bit of Dawn French. Well, I knew she was yummy but PHWOOARH!
nudge, nudge, wink, wink, SAY NO MORE!
What was the article about? WHO CARES! Lets go back and look at bits of Dawn French!
Paris, because shes wondering why she's an unattractive whore; who would you rather have a pint or nine with?
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