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Microsoft Programming

Visual Studio 2013 Released 198

jones_supa writes "Final releases of Visual Studio 2013, .NET 4.5.1, and Team Foundation Server 2013 are now available. As part of the new release, the C++ engine implements variadic templates, delegating constructors, non-static data member initializers, uniform initialization, and 'using' aliases. The editor has seen new features, C++ improvements and performance optimizations. Support for Windows 8.1 has been enhanced and the new XAML UI Responsiveness tool and Profile Guided Optimization help to analyze responsiveness in Windows Store apps. Graphics debugging has been furthered to have better C++ AMP tools and a new remote debugger (x86, x64, ARM). As before, MSDN and DreamSpark subscribers can obtain the releases from the respective channels, and the Express edition is available zero cost for all."
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Visual Studio 2013 Released

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  • Who cares? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by faragon ( 789704 )
    Visual Studio 2010 was already bloated and brain-dead. TFS sucks and the Git integration is poor. Not worth it, in my opinion.
    • Re: Who cares? (Score:3, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Both VS and TFS 2012 were massive improvements over the 2010 editions for what its worth. 2013 seems more iterative and superfluous.

      • Re: Who cares? (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 17, 2013 @05:45PM (#45158623)

        I disagree

        VS2012 was massive improvement in terms of features. Unfortunately, those features consumed A LOT of resources, to the point it was completely unusable on my computer (on start, after a few minutes, VS2012 would show a message saying "your computer is too slow for VS2012").

        VS2013 is as feature rich (actually, more) than VS2012 *and* it consumes LESS resources than 2010. I have been using it since the Preview (with ReSharper and a few more plugins) and it's great.

        • I've been using VS2012 on a 5 year old laptop, that was midrange at best when new. The requirements don't seem that steep.

        • Re: Who cares? (Score:4, Informative)

          by ATMAvatar ( 648864 ) on Thursday October 17, 2013 @07:36PM (#45159643) Journal

          My experience was the opposite. VS2012 was night-and-day faster than VS2010 on my work machine, if only because it was much better at multi-threading. My peers had a similar experience. Perhaps my experience was different due to the fact that I don't run that many plug-ins.

          VS2013 is an improvement as well, so I am curious to see how quickly I can get an upgrade approved.

          • by Xest ( 935314 )

            It was the UI that made me hate 2012. The largely black and white themed icons slowed me down in finding the file I wanted in solution explorer in larger projects which was fucking annoying. It took some used to having the menu bars shouting at you all the time too.

            I also hate the fact that it's a step backwards feature wise in some ways also, no more automated generation of unit tests for a class when using MSTest for example. I've also found NuGet can be quite annoying with it breaking once or twice and m

            • Nuget gets broken when using the standard mode. Part of the problem is that when you check in, it doesn't automatically select all files for checkin, and most people don't pay attention.

              This is why the new(er) Package Restore mode works so much better (on top of not filling up your version control database with binaries).

              The UI was largely addressed after a couple of months by a new version of the Theme Switcher and a hack to add in color icons. Many of the icons in 2013 are still monochrome, but a large

      • If you're using C++, VS 2013 comes with a much better compiler in terms of standards compliance, with more C++11 features (notably, variadic templates), and even some small pieces of C++14.

    • How so? I'm using 2012 at work and feels just as good as any version so far. Debugging unit tests couldn't be easier, resharper helps a ton, etc. What bloat are you talking about that is preventing you from actually working?
  • Programs! (Score:4, Insightful)

    by TechyImmigrant ( 175943 ) on Thursday October 17, 2013 @05:11PM (#45158251) Homepage Journal

    I look back with fondness for the times when a program was a set of instructions and declarations written in a programming language, rather than am odd derivative of C++ tied to a billion files in various XML schemas.

    • I look forward to the time when I can tell my computer, in plain English, what I need it to do and it just does it without having to program a specific application to do a specific function.

      • Be careful what you ask for. Computers are vindictive. One that has free reign to misinterpret what you are asking for it going to be nothing but trouble.

    • If you see no value in fancy technologies, then don't use them.
      • That's why I like my Apple 2e

        • Wish I still had my Epson 286. It was actually good for doing work.... I mean real work, not writing a letter with 100 fonts in it or making a spreadsheet so large and complex that no one could ever find all the errors in it.
    • by OzPeter ( 195038 ) on Thursday October 17, 2013 @05:58PM (#45158745)

      I look back with fondness for the times when a program was a set of instructions and declarations written in a programming language, rather than am odd derivative of C++ tied to a billion files in various XML schemas.

      Yeah and I remember hand crafting make files in order to build systems from all that carefully written C code.
       
      I mean I really hate myself for clicking on the NuGet package manager that I installed in VS, browsing a huge number of open source solutions and downloading and installing libraries and libraries of useful code with almost a single click. Yeah .. progress sucks

      • Re:Programs! (Score:5, Insightful)

        by murdocj ( 543661 ) on Thursday October 17, 2013 @06:09PM (#45158859)

        Using lots of libraries and components is great... when it all works. When your app won't build and you get an obscure error message from some package that you didn't even know you were using, it's not so much fun. I handcrafted make files as well. At least then, I knew what was going on, and what depended on what.

        • by Xest ( 935314 )

          I'd worry about a developer that doesn't even know what packages he is using.

          It's not like NuGet provides a list of installed packages or anything. Oh wait.

          You still know what's going on now. Scrap that. Competent developers still know what's going on now. The configs are still open and human readable, most people are aware of what dependencies they've added to their projects by simply not shutting down their brain whilst installing dependencies but I don't see how if you can't keep track of what you instal

      • What better way to expand your attack surface.

        Truly, in the Age of Information, the Hackers shall inherit the Earth.

    • The tension between KISS and DRY has always been there. Both are fundamental principles and yet at some level they are incompatible, since writing reusable code necessarily involves increasing its complexity. And the less you want to RY, the more complexity you have to build in.

      The C++ STL is a shining example of this. Everyday developers shouldn't be writing their own lists and array and hashmaps. They definitely shouldn't write their own string utilities. And they shouldn't have to change those implementa

  • by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 17, 2013 @05:12PM (#45158257)

    I tried to do

    yum localinstall visualstudio-2013.exe

    but it wouldn't load on any of my Fedora or CentOS boxes. Tried the same with aptitude on my Debian boxes, same story.

    Is someone gonna repackage this for our favorite distro? Really, these guys are worse than Canonical when it comes to supporting the community.

    • I'm really sorry. We tried to build an RPM and a DEB, but for some reason no distro provides kernel32.dll in its repositories, and we need it as a dependency. I hope they fix that soon. ~

  • by mark-t ( 151149 ) <markt.nerdflat@com> on Thursday October 17, 2013 @05:13PM (#45158261) Journal

    (sigh)

    Oh well... maybe next year they'll catch up. Oh wait, that's when C++14 is supposed to be standardized.

    [double facepalm]

  • Is it just me, or did other people read that as The F*cking Software?
    • As someone who is obliged to use TFS, I would say that your reading is correct.
  • At work, we just had to downgrade one of our products because the customer couldn't handle .NET 4.0. Will the world please catch up with Microsoft, please?
    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by 0123456 ( 636235 )

      I thought .NET was dead and the Microsoft future was HTML5 now?

      • What have *you* been huffing? .NET, in one form or another, is *the* main development framework Microsoft has been pushing the last few years, honestly.

        Windows desktop pre-Win8: Native code or .NET.
        Win8 / Windows RT apps: .NET (via the subset usable in WinRT), native code (same caveat), or HTML5/JS.
        Windows Phone 7: .NET (via Silverlight) or .NET (via XNA).
        Windows Phone 8: .NET (via WinRT subset for phone) or native code (WinRT).
        Xbox 360 indie games: .NET (via XNA).

        This goes back even further, actually, but

        • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

          by Anonymous Coward

          Apparently you missed the renewed interest in C++. .NET is still very popular, but the .NET team never sold the Windows development team on .NET, who went off in their own direction with Metro and additions to WinAPI. So, if we're talking the past two years, then .NET is definitely not *the* main development framework, it's C++ (i.e. native code). How have you missed this? There have been a ton of articles over the past couple of years analyzing Microsoft's schizophrenia.

          Perhaps you were just working really

          • by Xest ( 935314 )

            The C++ frameworks have always had the cutting edge features first. MFC received ribbon support before the managed frameworks for example. This is because the managed frameworks usually just wrap around that anyway - i.e. WinForms wasn't much more than a wrapper around Win32 API.

            But that doesn't mean they're the preferred, main, or recommended development framework. The Windows development team use C++ because they're doing OS development and it's the best tool for the job, coupled with the fact it's all bu

            • Microsoft has been pushing the idea that native code development is back (not that I noticed it was gone, I just kept writing C++). This may not be the best idea (I find your suggestion about pushing .NET instead very plausible), but MS is at least publicly changing direction. Not as bad as Apple used to do, but it isn't pretty.

            • This is because the managed frameworks usually just wrap around that anyway - i.e. WinForms wasn't much more than a wrapper around Win32 API.

              This actually hasn't been true for a while. You're right on WinForms, but that has been de facto deprecated from .NET 3 onwards, with WPF taking its place - and WPF doesn't wrap any OS API, it does everything down to rendering on its own (and that is directly on top of Direct3D). Similarly, WPF Ribbon does not wrap the OS ribbon, it reimplements it.

              Also, MFC received ribbon support first simply because Microsoft has bought it from a third party company which implemented it already. I believe it is also a fr

          • I write equal amounts native and managed code. I'll grant that managed ha seen a resurgence, but the only way you could call it the "main" framework is to note that the last few tool versions have added more updates to native-oriented tools than managed-oriented ones... which sounds good until you realie that the native tools were left to languish for so long that these updates have been almost entirely a matter of catching up, while .NET has still gotten a bunch of cool new stuff like async.

    • Will the world please catch up with Microsoft, please?

      LOL. We're waiting for Microsoft to catch up. It ain't 2008, bitch.

  • I'd like to ask - what am I missing?

    Until recently, I hadn't programmed in anything apart from Matlab in Linux (which has a crappy "IDE") in over ten years (the last version of VS I ever used in any way was VS6.0). Anyway, I started to work on Python and C++, and have so far found a lot of positives with the IDE (Ultimate VS2012 - free from my organization).

    VsVim and PTVS let me use a vim like editing features, and Python Tools for VS has also performed well (interactive debugging, autcomplete and comman

    • Missing relative to other tools? Not terribly much, honestly; I wouldn't use VS for Java (by preference, I'd use NetBeans) or for POSIX native code, but both are possible. Some VS extensions are very handy; there's a tool for finding, installing and updating them called NuGet (should be built into current versions of VS, I think); you may want to check them out although it sounds like you've already found some plugins that you like. The git integration will probably improve over time; there has already been an update or two. Eclipse has slightly more refactoring power than is built into VS, but there are plugins for that and the Eclipse UI drives me nuts when I try to use it. The only major thing that comes to mind is that VS isn't going to run on anything except Windows (unless Wine support for it is a lot better than I remember) so, although there are Linux-compatible IDEs that can read its project files, it might not be the ideal tool for mixed environments.

    • Out of curiosity, did you have a chance to look at the Python/C++ mixed mode debugging [codeplex.com], and if so, how did you find it?

      (I'm the PTVS developer who implemented it, and I'm always looking for feedback from users who use the feature on real-world applications, especially in terms of use cases, scenarios etc - i.e. what can be added or rearranged to improve the typical or not-so-typical workflow or make it more convenient. Bug reports are also always welcome, of course!)

  • It seems that the editor changes are mainly a roll in of the powertools (I don't do client side web dev so javascript and ASP side of things don't matter to me). Makes me wonder: what will the next power tools be as it seems to be the only way I'll be getting new editor features?

    I can't remember if VS2012 added it or not as my work developes mainly in 2010 but a big one I'd like to see is coding time checks on stored procedures for database projects. It annoys me that I have to migrate my database and run u

  • by andrew3 ( 2250992 ) on Friday October 18, 2013 @12:14AM (#45161343)

    Writing a program in Visual Studio requires mandatory registration, or the program will refuse to start up. This also gives Microsoft to arbitrarily deny specific programmers the ability to publish a program.

    Oh, and this, from the VS 2010 Privacy Policy [microsoft.com], suggests that Microsoft can remotely target your computer after it does error reporting:

    In rare cases, such as problems that are especially difficult to solve, Microsoft may request additional data, including sections of memory (which may include memory shared by any or all applications running at the time the problem occurred), some registry settings, and one or more files from your computer. Your current documents may also be included. When additional data is requested, you can review the data and choose whether or not to send it.

    It's somewhat disappointing that Slashdot is used to advertise software like this. Fuck that, I'll stick with free (as in freedom) compilers like GCC, MinGW, LLVM etc. and free IDEs.

    • Microsoft can remotely target your computer

      When additional data is requested, you can review the data and choose whether or not to send it.

      Interesting use of "target."

    • by Xest ( 935314 )

      "It's somewhat disappointing that Slashdot is used to advertise software like this. Fuck that, I'll stick with free (as in freedom) compilers like GCC, MinGW, LLVM etc. and free IDEs."

      Yeah and free browsers like Firefox.

      Oh wait, guess what Mozilla does when Firefox crashes? It does the following:

      In rare cases, such as problems that are especially difficult to solve, Mozilla may request additional data, including sections of memory (which may include memory shared by any or all applications running at the ti

  • ... to quit. It's because of Microsoft that I haven't coded in C++ for fifteen years. Really, is there a single developer on /. that prefers this environment?

    Got to taunt: A C++ developer is only useful when he knows how to code in C.

    • by Xest ( 935314 )

      Given that most C++ projects I've received since forever from academic code on EdX through to proprietary game engine code contain a Visual Studio project I'd wager there's an awful lot of developers that prefer Visual Studio, and yes, I suspect a number of those are on Slashdot.

      Though I find it a lot odd you say you haven't coded in C++ in 15 years.

      Right, well aren't you just Mr Overqualified when it comes to judging then?

      I haven't used a BSD distribution in about 15 years so it'd seem a little odd if I sa

    • Apparently, about the time you stopped coding in C++ was the time I started professional C++ development (I'd been teaching myself for a few years before that).

      You should take a look at what C++ 11 can do for C++ code. It's rather dramatic. Nowadays, I almost never use raw pointers or call new or delete, and follow RAII practices. Result? Memory management is nearly automatic (it feels almost like garbage collection), and leaks are pretty much forgotten. The class with an actual destructor in it is fai

  • The installer that was removed at the introduction of VS2012 has not been re-introduced. That means that now the Nullsoft alternative is more attractive.

    The hope that Microsoft would adopt ADA is of course futile.

  • I basically just want C/C++ libraries, compilers and build tools. But not the GUI of Visual Studio.

    It used to be possible to Download the Windows SDK/Platform SDK for no charge, and it contained all the command line tools and libraries need to build applications. Now: directly from the download page [microsoft.com]: "The Windows SDK no longer ships with a complete command-line build environment. You must install a compiler and build environment separately. If you require a complete development environment that includes com

    • Yes, all Express editions that include C++ ship with a 64-bit compiler [slashdot.org] from VS 2012 onward.

      (I still wish it was a separate download, though. A lot of people don't need to write code, just to compile downloaded stuff - e.g. when installing Python packages from PyPI)

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