New Windows, new Visual Studio. But what will we find in Microsoft's popular development environment? While Microsoft recently previewed many of the new features in the next planned Visual Studio, these have, unfortunately, excluded the HTML and Windows 8 tools that are likely to appear in the final version. Even so, there is …

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Monday 13th June 2011 10:55 GMT Anonymous Coward

Most accessors are nearly identical...

I jhave some serious doubts about the cut-n-paste detection idea...

Yeah... right... most accessors in most modern object oriented languages are nearly identical. That is 90% of cut-n-paste code in nearly any class/module or whatever it is called today.

The only way of "joining" these is to use a dictionary and look under what name your accessor has been called. That is actually _MORE_ error prone than cut-n-pasting.

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Monday 13th June 2011 10:55 GMT AndrueC

Huh

Before they add yet more bloat to the product I'd like to see them address the performance issues and fix the existing UI. They claimed they were doing that in vs2010 but there was precious little evidence in my experience.

And what's this 'Much loved' crap? Every developer I know puts up with VS only because management force them to use it and it's about the only game in town these days.

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Monday 13th June 2011 11:04 GMT Anonymous Coward

How about they concentrate on the basics first?

How about they make their current features better first, before adding another load of half baked ones. Like making a usable IDE that doesn't need ReSharper to give it decent code editing (which is what I spend most of my day doing). Oh, and making the 'options' dialogue resizeable would be an amazing leap forward into the future, rather than having to scroll through lists of fonts and other settings in a postage stamp size window. And TFS source control is an absolute joke - I can't believe they make money from that when there are free source control systems that are so much better and easier to use (eg Bazaar).

As usual, MS will spend too much time ticking feature boxes, rather than actually making any of their features usable and a joy to use. I just wish JetBrains made a C# IDE.

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Monday 13th June 2011 12:08 GMT dchassels

But what happened to Bill Gates' holy grail of software?

In 2008 Bill Gates indicated work on "code D" - quote “Most code that’s written today is procedural code. And there’s been this holy grail of development forever, which is that you shouldn’t have to write so much [procedural] code,” Gates said. “We’re investing very heavily to say that customization of applications, the dream, the quest, we call it, should take a tenth as much code as it takes today.” “You should be able to do things on a declarative basis,”

“We’re not here yet saying that [a declarative language has] happened and you should write a ton less procedural code, but that's the direction the industry is going,” Gates said. “And, despite the fact that it’s taken longer than people expected, we really believe in it. It’s something that will change software development”

This Visual studio seems someway short? Has Microsoft abandoned this "dream"? It would change their business away from traditional developers but they as ever would not be first. The good news is it has been developed in UK by a SMB innovator Procession which started some 10 years before. The result is a profound as indicated by Bill Gates in that for business software there is now a new alternative to COTS and custom coded solutions. This new “paradigm” results in the core code not needing to change and no code generation or compiling to build exactly what the business requires; both at original build and for future change. The gap between business and IT is thus closed with no more “ping pong” with code developers.

This is based upon on some very simple principles that first people create all source information and that there are relatively few work task types including the user interface that can address all business logic. Such logic never really changes what has changed is the technology led delivery mechanisms. So it is important that these two key aspects are separated to allow both agility in the software and also recognise upgrades to delivery technologies are inevitable and should have very little if any effect on the business application. All build takes place via a graphical interface a bit like visual studio on steroids! This is all very simple in concept – some would observe “too simple” for an industry that has thrived on complexity?

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Monday 13th June 2011 12:13 GMT Anonymous Coward

do as I say, not as I do/did?

Do they use it themselves?

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Monday 13th June 2011 12:14 GMT Trollslayer

Help

No, help as in F1 - Intellisense.

This was ruined in VS2010, a tray app that was slow to load, relied far too much on incomplete on-line information etc.

Basics basics basics please!

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1. Monday 13th June 2011 14:09 GMT AndrueC
  
  Don't mention the help!
  
  Does anyone ever use VS help? Gawd I pity them if they do. I just tested it and on my dual core 2.4GHz machine it took 20 seconds to even display the window then another 13 seconds (33 in all) to display the topic for the 'string' C# keyword.
  
  Some other gems:
  
  * Opening a forms designer for the first time: 14 seconds.
  
  * Loading VS - half a minute before I can do anything with it.
  
  * Loading a solution - another half a minute even for simple solutions.
  
  Then there are a plethora of UI annoyances. One of the most annoying being the string WinForms editor selecting the text I'm typing after a few seconds so that my next key press wipes it all out. Another good one - the properties of a C# application. Half a dozen seconds to appear and then even though it's maximised the controls stick to their original (too small) size.
  
  Bah.
  
  /rant.
  
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  1. Tuesday 14th June 2011 14:49 GMT JC_
    
    Get an SSD
    
    Get an SSD and VS2010 is 10 times faster. I put one in my 4 year old dual-core laptop and it's now no problem, even when working on solutions containing 20+ projects.
    
    Yeah, SSDs are expensive and small, but the time it saves you will well and truly justify the cost.
    
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2. Tuesday 14th June 2011 06:34 GMT NullReference Exception
  
  Help fixed
  
  Install Service Pack 1. They apparently woke up and dumped the browser-based help in favor of a real help viewer tool (and they brought back the help index too!)
  
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  1. Tuesday 14th June 2011 12:53 GMT AndrueC
    
    Hmmm
    
    Is that vs2010? I'm still mostly on vs2008 (takes time for our managers to approve upgrades) and it has SP1.
    
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Monday 13th June 2011 14:08 GMT Ken Hagan

Dev and Ops ping pong?

If you make it easier for ops to deliver accurate bug reports then you've just reduced the penalty for leaving bugs in. Meanwhile, the reward for shipping early has remained constant.

I'll let you all make your own predictions for the long-term effects.

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Monday 13th June 2011 15:57 GMT peredur

It's aimed at managers

They're the ones who think all this bloat is cool. Coders want an editor and a debugger (probably). For source control, use mercurial or SVN.

When I used to do .NET coding I used one of the fancy versions of VS, but could just have easily have used the free version. The rest of the team were the same. We also worked with some companies who wrote some very large systems. They may have used all the bells and whistles. I don't know. I never asked. I do know that their code was, without exception, awful.

Just my 2c. Worth what you paid for it.

Cheers

PAE

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1. Monday 13th June 2011 21:26 GMT Kevin Bailey
  
  No you couldn't...
  
  ...sorry to disagree.
  
  I tried for quite a while to build a data loading app using the basic free editor which used to be available - called ASP.NET Web Matrix.
  
  I soon hit limits - and all the other devs were all saying that you needed VS to do anything much more serious than 'Hello world'. And you're right - VS automatically brought in all sorts of stuff which I couldn't track and the app became impossible to deploy.
  
  To fix this I thought I'd install VS directly on the dev server - which caused .NET to stop working altogether.
  
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Monday 13th June 2011 21:14 GMT marc 9

I like VS

After having to use Xcode and Eclipse I lot recently, I really miss Visual Studio. I am just so much more productive in it.

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Tuesday 14th June 2011 06:34 GMT Anonymous Coward

Microsoft lacks innovation IMO

Disclaimer: I am no "die hard" developer yet know my way around. My main profession lies with Java which I've picked up over the years of Solaris administration. Now that I'm getting more involved with Window servers (2003 and 2008) I'm also looking a bit more into .NET. Obviously I'm not ready to spend money on this so I've picked up the VS Express versions for both Visual Basic (which hopefully helps me with my VBA study too) and C#.

I think that MS can't utilize innovation even when its right in front of their faces screaming out to be used.

Now; I am a Java-weenie, but seriously; one of the things which makes getting more into .NET quite hard on my part is the lack of Javadoc or - obviously - a .NET counterpart. But when I started to play with "C# Express" there were 2 things which immediately caught my attention. The .NET "Object Browser" which has IMO some awesome potential (I tend to compare that with "Javadoc" as in; a 'roadmap' to everything the framework has to offer) as well as their embedded webbrowser.

Now; the first (object browser) may leave some points open to discussion but honestly I cannot understand why they didn't bother to expand on their embedded webbrowser. I'd LOVE to see something like that in Netbeans (Java IDE). And yes I know; there is an experimental browser plugin for Netbeans, but by FAR as usable as the embedded browser in VS.

Yet MS doesn't seem to do anything significant with it. You can use it to access the .NET website or URLs from the RSS feed. But that's it. It has SO much potential, why the fsck isn't this browser (for example) being used to allow us to access some online documentation repository ?

Why can't MS come up with something similar to the documentation schemes which Java offers? Don't they realize that having developers taking an interest in you is one thing, it is CRUCIAL to provide them with proper tools (VS Express is IMO a step in the right direction) AND information and documentation ?

My take on the matter is that MS needs to listen more to the "community". Better put: to their customers. While their website and products (Win7 & Office 2010) make it look as if they take more interest to what people think and experience, the way they deal with this information makes me seriously wonder if everything isn't going straight down to /dev/null.

As said; IMO they can't handle innovating opportunities even if it bites them in the behinds...

Then again.. I'm also not too sure if I'd like seeing them getting more of an upper hand again, but that's for another article.

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Tuesday 14th June 2011 15:44 GMT LittleTyke

Visual Basic 6 is the only product worth bothering with

Microsoft killed the best, most widely used programming system, Visual Basic 6. They then tried to sell their awful .Net replacement for years, but this is just a niche product now. Funny, though, that MS still provides the Visual Basic 6 runtime on its latest operating systems! This could be because of the literally hundreds of thousands of Visual Basic 6 applications out there and being used on a daily basis.

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1. Thursday 16th June 2011 21:18 GMT oroboros
  
  Vb6? Don't bother
  
  Nah, Visual Basic 6 was just a toy. Basic is the key word, to make anything work properly you had to create hackish work arounds. And that's not to mention the endless DLL hell, no VB6 was retired about 6 versions too late.
  
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