Microsoft Visual Studio 2012 launch spreads desktop app love As expected, Microsoft officially launched the latest iteration of its developer tools on Wednesday, including Visual Studio 2012, .Net 4.5, and the surprise debut of a new member of Redmond's Express family of free IDEs, this one for building Windows desktop applications. S. Somasegar, corporate VP of Microsoft's developer …
If you check the download links for 'Express 2012 for Windows 8' and 'Express 2012 for desktop' you'll notice that both point to the same link (linkid 9816758 for the web installer and 9816768 for the ISO). It seems to me as if someone replaced one version with the other.
I noticed after I first installed the desktop version and then wanted to install the Windows 8 version. Instead of a new installer I was greeted with the option to either repair or remove the desktop version.
That's retarded.
A better analogy would be "imagine if you couldn't get the Internet on your seven-old TV".
Which, in case you hadn't noticed, you can't. Not without buying something \a lot more expensive than a $40 Windows 8 upgrade, anyway. (XP->Win8 faals into the discount range).
According to browser stats, XP has around 42% of the market (Windows 7 only overtook it recently). The IDE doesn't need to run on XP itself, but if you want to sell your software to nearly half the market, you need a compiler that generates XP code.
The good news is that Microsoft have promised XP-code generation in a patch later this year.
According to browser stats, XP has around 42% of the market
But that's not how MS would like it to be.
I'm currently doing a contract on a secured site (with the .gov.uk email address and everything!) where all the desktop clients are XP because it's been SC cleared for a million years and government doesn't have any money right now. However - and this is really important - nobody in the IT and Dev departments is doing any work on XP outside of Outlook.
We all connect to Windows Server desktops via RDC to do any work. I spoke with the manager here yesterday and he says this will continue once Win8 is released with a change to Win7 virtualised instances because the licensing costs for that will drop as soon as MS is pushing the new shiny.
MS don't want to support XP because they don't want people to run it. Even the slowest of the slow are moving away from it and taking advantage of virtualisation.
And anyway, if you're determined to keep your 11 year old OS, you can just keep your 2 year old IDE to write code for it as well.
Visual Studio used to be a great IDE. Now, it gets all entangled with the rest of the operating system, is constantly going out to the Net, and the off-line help pages have been destroyed. Want help with the syntax of an API? No longer can you simply click help. Now, asking for help brings you to the MSN Forums along with many others all asking the same question, "What is up with this?"
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