Microsoft appears like they may actually be starting to get serious about cross platform support. Their new slim code editor for developing cloud applications supports both OS X and Linux, as well as Windows.
At its Build developer conference, Microsoft today announced the launch of Visual Studio Code, a lightweight cross-platform code editor for writing modern web and cloud applications that will run on OS X, Linux and Windows. The application is still officially in preview, but you can now download it here (if this link isn’t live yet, give it a few more minutes and then try again).
This marks the first time that Microsoft offers developers a true cross-platform code editor. The full Visual Studio is still Windows-only, but today’s announcement shows the company’s commitment to supporting other platforms.
From the Techcrunch article:
Today’s announcement will surely come as a surprise to many. It does, however, fit in well with the direction the company’s developer group has been on for quite a while now, be that the open sourcing of .NET Core (and taking that platform cross-platform) or the launch of the free Visual Studio Community edition.
Roy Schestowitz at TechRights reports "Visual Studio Code": Not News, Not Free, Not Open Source
Another publicity stunt from Microsoft, this time going under the name "Visual Studio Code", which is basically proprietary lock-in
Despite an openwashing campaign and an effort to deceive the public (as chronicled here before), Visual Studio is (and will remain) proprietary. There is currently yet another PR blitz from Microsoft, which at the moment is trying to openwash it and pretend that it's "news" (it's not, it goes back to last year).
Sadly, some FOSS proponents have already fallen for it and Phoronix is doing marketing for Microsoft. This is not really news and it's not even a surprise. It's just some publicity stunt which got Microsoft boosters and Microsoft-friendly sites on board.
(Score: 1) by HyperQuantum on Friday May 01 2015, @10:49AM
I recently switched from Code::Blocks to Qt Creator. And the latter is giving me a much better experience.
There was one really annoying bug that made Code::Blocks difficult to use for me: it was always freezing every couple of seconds everytime I typed in some source files. First it were only the files containing a "main" function, but then I discovered it had the same problem with a new header file that contained only some enum declarations. I looked for a possible fix online, and it seemed like the bug was probably fixed in their SVN. But there was no (easy) way for me to get that fix; no indication of a new Code::Blocks release in the future (and its last release was in December, 2013, which seems like ages ago), and installing a nightly build would be cumbersome. Seriously, why does a mature open-source project like Code::Blocks not have an easy to find roadmap for future releases?
And there were some other annoyances as well. Intellisense in Code::Blocks seemed really dumb to me, it showed way too many suggestions during auto-completion, even things that didn't make sense. It gave the impression that it didn't really understand C++.
Really, Qt Creator is a hundred times better than Code::Blocks in my experience.
(Score: 2) by tonyPick on Saturday May 02 2015, @08:18AM
I'd agree that for local machine usage Qt Creator is a much nicer experience, and the parser spike when you open files is something I've seen in C::B as well.
However the killer is the remote performance - Qt Creator is basically unusable over remote X - it's painfully slow and laggy, and that's a very common use case around the places I work (think build servers and VM's with embedded dev environments). As a result C::B gets used more because it's pretty much seamless.
(If I could fix Qt's remote problems I'd switch over in a heartbeat though)