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posted by janrinok on Sunday May 06 2018, @11:35AM   Printer-friendly
from the what's-in-a-name? dept.

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.


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  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 06 2018, @02:27PM (13 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 06 2018, @02:27PM (#676356)

    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 :)

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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Sunday May 06 2018, @03:11PM (2 children)

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Sunday May 06 2018, @03:11PM (#676372)

    VS is (was?) perhaps the single best IDE available.

    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)

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 06 2018, @11:32PM (#676476)

      What won in 2010-2015?

  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 06 2018, @03:45PM (5 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 06 2018, @03:45PM (#676383)

    I do sometimes miss the simplicity of Visual Basic 6

    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)

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 06 2018, @05:16PM (#676405)

      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)

        by vux984 (5045) on Monday May 07 2018, @02:31AM (#676539)

        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

          by anubi (2828) on Monday May 07 2018, @08:15AM (#676580) Journal

          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)

          by TheRaven (270) on Monday May 07 2018, @12:40PM (#676623) Journal

          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

            by vux984 (5045) on Monday May 07 2018, @04:13PM (#676678)

            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

      by JoeMerchant (3937) on Monday May 07 2018, @12:19AM (#676492)

      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

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 07 2018, @05:42PM (#676702)

      "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

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 07 2018, @09:02AM (#676588)

    but from what I hear VS is (was?) perhaps the single best IDE available

    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.