The signs are undeniable at this point.
The very first sign was when Microsoft refused to port Visual Studio (VS) to 64 bit. While VS is indeed a large codebase, MS had no qualms doing the same for Microsoft Office. The fact that they no longer want to invest too much resources into it should point to the fact Visual Studio is very much in maintenance mode now.
Visual Studio was always paid software. But in 2014 MS introduced the Community Edition. The only real difference between it and the Pro (paid) version is the 'Code Lens' feature. Another sign that MS no longer sees Visual Studio as driving any meaningful revenue.
[...] Visual Studio Code continues to release enhancements every single month, moving at a fast pace. Compare that to Visual Studio Pro, whose development seems pretty much only about updating its integration of the various Language Services to the latest version.
With Microsoft's focus shifting from Windows to Azure, it is but natural that they no longer want an IDE that runs only on Windows. Thus comes in VS Code, a free, cross platform IDE that supports all modern languages.
(Score: 3, Funny) by JoeMerchant on Sunday May 06 2018, @12:29PM (10 children)
Embrace, Extend, Exti... Exti... EXTI... ah, fuck it.
There are plenty of fat corporations to make bank from, little people love free, little people will choose free almost every time.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 06 2018, @12:38PM (1 child)
Perfect opportunity for the "new" Microsoft to show it has changed and Open source the code. Plenty of developers would work on maintaining a generally well respected product like VS.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Sunday May 06 2018, @03:04PM
Can't. Objective measures of code quality would be too embarrassing and call into question the stability, security, and value of the remaining profitable products.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 5, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 06 2018, @02:51PM (1 child)
The "community" edition is full of telemetry. If this new one is cross platform, enjoy your new mac/linux spyware.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Ethanol-fueled on Sunday May 06 2018, @07:41PM
That must be the reason why it's so goddamn slow, even on reasonably modern upper-middleend machines.
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Sunday May 06 2018, @03:08PM (4 children)
FTFY.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday May 06 2018, @03:14PM (3 children)
I think they're trying to keep up with the new kids - learn how to monetize your audience without charging them admission. Trying, even if they don't do it well it can still be a profit center.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by LoRdTAW on Sunday May 06 2018, @03:16PM (2 children)
Windows store strategy? Give away the compiler....
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday May 06 2018, @03:59PM (1 child)
Better than the chair throwing strategy.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 06 2018, @09:44PM
McCoy: "It's dead, Jim."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 06 2018, @03:27PM
Ash Williams, is that you?
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Subsentient on Sunday May 06 2018, @01:02PM (17 children)
Compilers like gcc, clang, tiny C compiler, even Intel compiler, all support the GNU way of passing options, and as far as I know, Visual Studio STILL does not.
Who in the right mind would want to A. limit themselves to Microsoft's compiler or B. spend all the time and energy to keep two separate build systems and sets of CFLAGS for Visual Studio, and then the REST of the compiler world?
If you need to develop for Windows, use MinGW. It works great. I use it to port my C and C++ stuff to Windows, for the unfortunates who still use Windows but want my shitty code.
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." -Jiddu Krishnamurti
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 06 2018, @02:27PM (13 children)
The compiler options may not be GNU-compatible, but from what I hear VS is (was?) perhaps the single best IDE available. Doubly so if you only care about Windows, which is still true for an unreasonably large number of companies (especially for that largest of all software categories, in-house software). I've encountered countless lamentations about the lack of equivalent IDEs on other platforms.
I have little doubt that Visual Studio was the king of IDEs for a very long time - if you ignore that entire pesky "freedom" aspect, of course.
Personally I prefer FLOSS and haven't used VS since high school (pirated VS6). I do sometimes miss the simplicity of Visual Basic 6 :)
(Score: 4, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Sunday May 06 2018, @03:11PM (2 children)
All depends on perspective. From mine, the VS IDE was the best in the 2006-2010 timeframe, then it wasn't until about 2015, then it regained a lot of ground with VS2015.
Since 1990, my perpetual complaint about Microsoft development tools is their treadmill effect. While I'm using MS tools I seem to spend more time updating my old code to work in their new environments than I do creating new functionality. They have improved since the days of "New DOS" every 6 months, but the treadmill is still very prominent when new project environment selections come up. I don't care much anymore about which IDE is "the best" today, I do care about which one will give me the best stability and lowest maintenance costs over the coming 10+ years.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 06 2018, @11:32PM (1 child)
What won in 2010-2015?
(Score: 3, Funny) by driverless on Monday May 07 2018, @01:07AM
vi and gcc.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 06 2018, @03:45PM (5 children)
Heh, that's some powerful nostalgia. I once had the misfortune of developing a rather large software package in VB 6 (also inherited some VB 5 stuff at that job). I think the boss (an "idea man," but his paychecks cleared the bank... until they didn't, c'est la vie) had some delusions of breaking into the ERP market, and this thing was kind of ERP-lite. Was actually ahead of its time the way the guy wanted us to use touchscreen stations. (Was before tablets were commonplace.) It became apparent quickly that =VB-6 was in no way designed to function past a certain size and complexity. Don't get me wrong. That job I only took out of desperation.
I've always found how insular the M$ world is very strange. It's like they're delusional enough to think that if they just keep dread GNU out of their stuff, it'll prevent people from leaving the platform. I'm really hoping there's critical mass for games under Linux very soon. I'm dreading the day I install Windows 10 just to play, as that other AC put it, cowboys and Indians in space.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 06 2018, @05:16PM (4 children)
VB6 gets a lot of hate not for the language itself. But because it was *easy* to put things together quickly that worked well enough. That led to many people doing software work. They did not use the rigor they should have and created monsters. I have seen extremely well written code in vb6. I have seen monsters. It was good for what it was. It was a rapid prototyping language. The problem is prototypes usually ship. Now you are locked in with 2+ years of tech debt. No one is going to fund a re-write for 2 years and get the same thing you had 2 years previous on the other end. So suck it up buttercup and fix it. I am watching as people redo this again and again. With python, perl, npm/angular, js framework of the week, java, c# and so on. I expect rust and go will be thrown on those piles soon enough.
(Score: 2) by vux984 on Monday May 07 2018, @02:31AM (3 children)
Unless I'm mis-remembering VB6 also broke one of the cardinal rules of good development platform design -- the source code wasn't stored in plaintext; especially form / layout design. It had a GUI form designer like a lot of IDEs provide but you couldn't simply toggle it and look at and work directly with the source (e.g. in WCF you can toggle to the xml view, or even in classic win32 you could work with the .RC fields directly. This makes vb6 projects extra difficult to work with and manage in any way outside of the VB6 IDE beyond a certain size.
(Score: 1) by anubi on Monday May 07 2018, @08:15AM
I get the idea even the author never knew if his work was laden with snoopware by the compiler itself. And with the filesizes what they are, and the obfuscation of the source code, one simply doesn't have the time to investigate.
If it works... ship it.
A business-class product.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Monday May 07 2018, @12:40PM (1 child)
You are misremembering. The source code was stored in plain text files and the GUI layouts were stored in a fairly simple text serialisation (which was easy to modify). The GUI libraries did not; however, make it easy to maintain MVC-style abstractions and so it was very common to have model state stored in the GUI, which led to not very maintainable code beyond a certain level of complexity.
VB6 had a lot of aspects of a modern programming language, but unfortunately everything was structured to avoid forcing you to use them. If was great for knocking up a quick prototype in a couple of hours, but terrible for anything more complex.
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2) by vux984 on Monday May 07 2018, @04:13PM
Your comment induced me to try and look it up, and you are right the forms themselves defined in .frm files are plaintext. But I'm not entirely remembering either; turns out I was remembering the .frx files, which are a proprietary binary format used by VB6 for various form resources including icons, images, long text resources, non-ansi strings (e.g. localization strings, unicode strings etc), and anything stored in a form property with a type of Variant.
And to my knowledge there was no way to alter or update any of that information except through the VB IDE, as the format was binary and undocumented. This also made the .frm files (which were plaintext) sometimes difficult to update by hand since they contained references to the frx file resources using offsets into the frx file, which you had no visibility to.
So for example you couldn't swap an icon on a menubar by dropping in a new icon file and updating the form to reference it. Instead you needed to put it into the form via the IDE which put it into the binary .frx file, and updated the .frm defintion with the new frx/offset. There was no way to do that without the IDE. Or even correct a typo in a longish string resource that had been stashed in the frx file.
Therefore although you could make some basic forms by editing the .frm directly, there was simply a lot you couldn't do without the IDE.
There were similar binary files associated with user controls (.ctx), property pages (.pgx) etc too.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Sunday May 06 2018, @11:01PM (2 children)
I could write Mac code on Windows and Windows code on the Mac
But it stopped supporting the desktop when Motorola sold CWs x86 compiler to Nokia only for Apple to then announce that they were killing PowerPC
It's popular for embedded. Freescale offers a mostly-useful free demo
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Monday May 07 2018, @12:19AM
And I wrote PalmOS apps on Windows with CW in the late 1990s.
QtCreator was lame in the extreme in 2006, and started coming into its own around 2010 - write Windows, Mac and Linux native apps on any of those platforms - code once, run anywhere. I haven't tried to use it for mobile apps yet, last time I looked (2013ish) it was pretty lame for mobile, but they've been working on it, I assume it's greatly improved by now - I just don't have a professional need for mobile apps at the moment.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 07 2018, @05:42PM
"I could write Mac code on Windows and Windows code on the Mac"
dirty bird.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 07 2018, @09:02AM
I've heard that too. The problem is, every one of them had Eclipse as their only reference.
There's pretty much agreement that Eclipse is the worst IDE available, so of course VS will be the best when only compared to Eclipse.
(Score: 2) by mobydisk on Sunday May 06 2018, @09:37PM (2 children)
I am confused. Your post seems to be comparing compilers with IDEs, which are different things. And what do you mean by "GNU way of passing options?" Surely I am missing something about what you are saying.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Sunday May 06 2018, @11:08PM (1 child)
- gdb
That way you can do CC=clang in your makefiles
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 3, Informative) by TheRaven on Monday May 07 2018, @12:42PM
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2) by fadrian on Sunday May 06 2018, @01:25PM (2 children)
I've found the start-up time for it to be excruciating, so I tend not to use it.
That is all.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 06 2018, @02:32PM
Well, it's an Electron app, so every time you start it you're also starting a full browser and JavaScript environment. If you want to see something even more excruciating, check the memory footprint :)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 06 2018, @05:21PM
All the big IDE's have terrible startup times.
I have used many of them over the years. VS is one of the better ones to use. Once you understand its build system it is kind of cool to use. But it takes time to use properly. Eclipse with its 'view' switching seems odd and confuses people on first use and even trips up veterans who have used it for years. VSCode is alright, but seems odd. I can not put my finger on it 'stripped' is the best term I can think up for it. Oh well, I am sure it will work out eventually at least its not codewarrior.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 06 2018, @02:20PM (2 children)
Non-free so could not as well exist. I'll consider when it's GPL licensed.
(Score: 5, Informative) by tadas on Sunday May 06 2018, @03:08PM (1 child)
The source is released under an MIT license. The Free Software Foundation lists the license as a free software license compatible with GPL3:
The *binaries* have a non-free license, so if that bothers you, compile yourself from the source.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 06 2018, @11:56PM
code.visualstudio.com/License [visualstudio.com]
github.com/Microsoft/vscode/blob/master/LICENSE.txt [github.com]
(Score: 5, Informative) by KritonK on Sunday May 06 2018, @03:51PM (4 children)
For those, like me, who couldn't make head or tails of the subject, Visual Studio Code [visualstudio.com] is an open source code editor by Microsoft, complete with a trendy dark theme, trendy, incomprehensible icons for important functions such as adding the plugin for your language of choice, and, most, important of all, telemetry [visualstudio.com], which is, of course, opt-out.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 06 2018, @07:03PM
Microsoft extend the name by one word (50%) and so increase the built-in vulnerability count by the same amount. ??
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 06 2018, @11:29PM
They ask us to "Try to reply to other people's comments instead of starting new threads." There was an earlier comment about telemetry [soylentnews.org].
(Score: 1) by DeVilla on Monday May 07 2018, @03:13AM (1 child)
Has anyone submitted a patch yet to completely disable all telemetry by default and make it opt in? It is open source. Site GDPR or something.
Better yet, submit a patch to send the telemetry to someone else instead and see how that goes over.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 07 2018, @06:26PM
Better yet, send fake telemetry that bleeps up their pattern matching algorithms. When all the coders get Hello Kitty ads, I'll laugh my pu..., um, cat off.
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Sunday May 06 2018, @08:24PM (3 children)
VSCode came up winning the "preferred code editor" category in the 2017 Go survey: https://blog.golang.org/survey2017-results [golang.org]
And mind you, the same survey found 64% linux, 49% macos and only 18% windows desktop users (multiple choice) so you can't just hand-wave it saying most of the sampled golang users are windows users. Especially considering the (neck-to-neck) runner-up is Vim. Though admittedly, it's a small sample size of a specific niche community of VSCode users. Still, a third-party survey confirmation...
compiling...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 06 2018, @08:29PM (1 child)
golang users are a special breed
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 06 2018, @08:55PM
Actually from what I've seen they're your typical back-end devs. Most come from Python and Java. A few from C++. Basically all the hallmarks of a boring business language just without the gradual feature creep and abstraction breakage. The generics issue is unfortunate though... But if it's the only way to keeps the code base sane and readable without five team meetings and multiple code-reviews for every LoC a day then it's a small price to pay.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 07 2018, @03:14AM
I suspect a significant portion of that 64% Microsoft IDE + self reported linux desktop users are really windows users who are ashamed to admit they use windows since windows users are somewhat looked down upon as non-technical and less proficient.
My circle is *NIX folks-- pretty much just vim and emacs-- no sign of a mouse centric IDE anywhere to be seen.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by mobydisk on Sunday May 06 2018, @09:33PM (4 children)
This article is nonsense. Visual Studio Code does a small fraction of what Visual Studio does. This article sounds like someone who just uses the IDE as a simple text editor and has no idea what most of the tool even does. VS Code -vs- VS Enterprise is like Notepad -vs- MS Office. If all you did is type mono-spaced text, then you might think Notepad is the future. Seriously: The author states that the only notable difference between VS community edition and VS enterprise edition is "Code Lens?" Really?
How did some random person's unsupported rant make it onto here?
(Score: 3, Informative) by black6host on Sunday May 06 2018, @10:04PM (3 children)
No, the author states that the only difference between the Community Version and the *PRO* version is Code Lens. NOT Enterprise.
If you look in the horses mouth, so to speak, I can see why that statement was made. True? Don't know. https://www.visualstudio.com/vs/compare/ [visualstudio.com]
(Score: 2) by sgleysti on Monday May 07 2018, @03:28AM
Right. Visual Studio Community has essentially the same functionality as Visual Studio Pro. The license is somewhat restrictive: Last I looked, you could only use Community if 5 or fewer devs at your company were using it, or for non-commercial/open source projects.
Visual Studio Code (https://code.visualstudio.com/ [visualstudio.com]) is just a text editor. It doesn't have any compilers, or even a build system that I'm aware of. For example, the page https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/languages/cpp [visualstudio.com] reports
That said, I actually really like Visual Studio Code. I use it to develop HTML/JavaScript applications, mostly calculators/solvers for various electronics circuits. At my last job, I used Visual Studio Community (well, VC++ and nmake) to compile some numerical software that I wrote in C++ because the resultant executables were much more performant than those produced by MinGW. I definitely prefer Visual Studio to Eclipse for C++ development on windows. On linux, I'll use Makefiles and a text editor.
(Score: 2) by mobydisk on Monday May 07 2018, @09:56PM (1 child)
Oops, I stand corrected. He's probably right that "Pro" is largely pointless then.
(Score: 2) by sgleysti on Wednesday May 09 2018, @03:21AM
You were mostly right. Visual Studio Code vs. Visual Studio (Community or Pro, both very similar) is like Notepad vs. MS Office, since VS Code doesn't have compilers.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Sunday May 06 2018, @10:55PM
I don't like windows shops because every morning I'm greeted with fake news from Redmond.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 07 2018, @09:07AM (1 child)
I'm glad most desktop applications haven't accepted the bullshit 'modern' standards of changing themselves every week. Not having to update something every month is a pro, not a con.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 07 2018, @07:22PM
I agree, the Web is a UI mess, still in Wild West Cowboy mode. I don't mind learning new things that add new value, but keeping up with the "UX" Flavor of the Month is like keeping up with the Kardashians. Both the Kardashians and Web UI "standards" suck in similar ways. No wonder web co's keep dumping old devs: fashion chasing bores those who finally realize the game.
(Score: 2) by tekk on Monday May 07 2018, @11:15AM
Their C++ compiler is developed lockstep with VS. When Microsoft announces that Windows is now building against clang and they're contributing a ton to it, or when they officially spin off MSVC and (probably) release the source, *then* I'lll believe the claim.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 07 2018, @06:57PM
Looks like a lot of dudes will have to learn to program.