Visual Studio 2013
visualstudio.com
visualstudio.com
"Posted by Microsoft on 9/23/2013 at 3:03 PM
Thank you for bringing up this issue. Unfortunately, this functionality was lost when the web project properties page was refactored. We are working to get this feature back into the product.
For now, if you have a project with this setting unchecked in VS 2012, and open it in VS 2013 it will respect your individual user settings until the first time that the servers section is modified on the web project properties page."
You play this kind of game with "automation" and you get burned. Build, configuration and deployment management are hard software problems and they need to be solved by smart people and real tools, not checkboxes and file selectors.
But even then, I need different settings for debug/release or x86/amd64 - and it's not really helping when there is incosistent naming across SDK's coming from Microsoft itself - where you can't match with one variable (say $(Target)) the given architecture, and it seems every group at Microsoft follows different conventions of how to name things.
You can't hack what you can't see, basically. And changes to the project file (or whatever other "wizard guided" IDE output you're using) are opaque by definition.
I am having a hard time truly understanding the difference (not that we use VS stuff for deployment anyways, but that is for other reasons).
A developer could add custom deployment info to the manual file and accidentally commit it just as easily.
You just do not like GUIs (which is a perfectly acceptable stance) but it has nothing to do with some fundamental difference.
Just because they supply a GUI doesn't mean it's the only way to change project settings. I'm not sure what led you to believe that.
While I'm probably in the minority, I edit my *.csproj files by hand and build from the command line for several of my projects. I do this for the exact reasons that you mention: I like control in the engineering process.
I'm unhappy that VS 2013 is putting user settings in the proj file willy nilly and I hope that it's fixed soon.
Your distinction is convenient and meaningless.
I had to re-do our TeamCity integration when they stripped out the IIS Path property out of the project file in favor of publishing profiles. For a shop like ours, where we have lots of small projects, automating the deployment is pretty critical. I don't want to have to add 120 publish profiles when previously I could rely on the project settings.
Ultimately, we hacked together a fix, but I'm still wary of their changes.
This bug is more of an issue for OSS than a company. IMO.
We have a dev environment where all our code builds upon checkout and then we have our own local environments to actually do development on. What's the problem with someone deciding that they want to run at hostname alias so-and-so on their local machine or port whatever instead of what's the default?
So basically you're saying is Stack Exchange development team does what ever the fuck they want to do?
You didn't give anywhere near enough information for someone to come to the conclusion he came to. And the anger with which he presents it is uncalled for.
(and possibly the ability to downvote)
I've been here for far longer than you and I'm still stuck in the 300 karma range. Why? Because of my timezone. Most people are asleep when I'm awake.
It is virtually impossible for me to submit an article and have it viewed by a large number of people before it is pushed off the front page. So all my submissions get low score, only for the same article to be submitted later in the day once NY and LA have woken up and get big karma scores for someone else. I've given up submitting, which is how you accumulate the big karma scores.
Unless you don't trust the basic competence of your team (in which case, it is probably time to find a new team), I don't see the need for that degree of uniformity.
Edit: Scott initially said "I will be in the update", not it will be in the update...
This is TFS and lots of project management tools in the cloud. TFS covers a lot of core stuff such as bug/work-item tracking, Scheduling/Planning, source control and automated builds. You get a reasonable baseline for free, and pay for usage after that.
It looks like it integrates with the Azure portal. Although a 'windows box' is required, this integrates with the free VS2013 Express editions as well. Props to Microsoft for bringing better developer tools to their environment.
What you have probably seen is something like this: http://www.hanselman.com/blog/UsingASurface2RTARMToGetActual...
Scott Hanselman used an Azure VM to run VS2013 and tools, and remoted into it from a coffee shop using a Surface 2 (the 'RT' flavor, not a full desktop). It's a nice way to work from lower power machines. To do this, of course, does require an Azure account, and after your 'intro' phase would be paid.
The support services provide things like source control, work item tracking, and similar 'in the cloud' but they work with your VS2013 install, wether on a desktop or on a VM on Azure.
Hope that clears things up!
http://www.derekhammer.com/2011/09/11/tfs-is-destroying-your...
Note: MS primarily uses perforce and git for source control.
For starters, you can now use git with TFS 2013 and Visual Studio Online (formerly TFS Online) rather than TFVC. See - http://blogs.msdn.com/b/mvpawardprogram/archive/2013/11/13/g...
Heh. No.
Also, almost everything in that link is out of date or wrong.
Anyhow, I say all of this because I was, not too long ago, brought into a medium sized organization that was using TFS and was asked to evaluate it against other options. What I found for this organization was that TFS was probably a best solution for their particular development process (very much a MS shop) but that they had both a poorly administered system (with most all of the reporting and project management features broken and with almost no direct QA feedback) and developers that were untrained on how to utilized all but the most basic features of the system. What made this audit particularly interesting to me was how the most productive people in the organization disliked TFS while most others were either indifferent or liked TFS because they had figured out how to game the few features that worked. So, yeah, in that case, TFS was "beyond terrible."
TFS is not a solution I would run in a recommend wholesale but it has a lot of nifty if you look under to hood.
Or maybe you think that TFS is visual source safe and well, that wasn't too great.
Honestly my experience is exactly the opposite: I watch windows people try to edit code and wince. Their hands are bouncing to the mouse and arrow keys constantly. They mash keys and wait for key repeat instead of deleting marked regions. They pop dialog boxes up to search for things and have to move them around the screen to see.
And yeah: sometimes they press some kind of button and get a big list of symbol names that they end up staring at for a while before picking one.
It all just seems like a mess to me, but I'm willing to be educated.
-Method and property completion on framework and own methods
-Parameter hints on all methods
-Enum completion
BUT, it doesn't work out of the box. You have to set up the plugins right, you have to make sure all the tools respect your compiler and library paths, in some of these environments you have to manually rerun your "tags" program for the editor to pick up the updates.
My point is that, even though all this stuff is getting better, it's still pretty far away from "just load stuff into Visual Studio and chances are you'll get a bunch of fancy stuff".
Also nice is being able to immediately pop up the man page for the symbol under the cursor, as well as language-specific documentation (like the Hyperspec in CL), and the ease of extending it to do exactly what you want, and supporting new languages, can't be beaten.
I refuse to work in an environment without jump to definition/references. These things should be considered a bare minimum requirement for a programmer's editor.
String.
For stuff I use all the time it isn't so useful, but when I'm unsure it's a lot quicker than running off to read an extensive reference guide. (and type completion is a time-saver too - no need to type out full variable names)
Snippets are pretty much available in every language, and they are a good start. The key thing about the tools VS (and resharper) add is that they understand the code, to a certain extent. So you're not merely doing text based processing of the code, but semantic processing at some level. Every year it gets better and better. As you come to understand what it is doing within that context, you can really use it to fly while coding, especially while doing things like refactoring.
You can sometimes follow along with ludum dare etc but that's mostly stuff hacked together quickly. I'd absolutely love it if top open source coders showed up live streaming their work.
- The full type signature of the function and its arguments (including generic/template parameters and constraints)
- Whether any of the arguments have default values and, if so, what they are
- Whether the last argument is a "params" or "..."
- The XMLDoc describing the function and every argument
- A scrollable list of every overload for that function name
Invoking Intellisense when not completing a function tells you:
- What code objects are available in your current scope
- What type of things those objects are (property, field, method, overloadable method in a subclass, ...)
- A list of snippets you could invoke from that point
All of this can be configured to show up automatically or only when invoked with specific key combinations. Also, the Visual Studio team has somehow made it so that all this stuff stays out of your way even when it comes up automagically. I've never seen any other IDE come close to being "always there yet unobtrusive". This includes Eclipse and they do it pretty well.
The biggest issue I have with your argument is that, while it's true that watching someone fumble around with their mouse while coding IS pretty painful, Intellisense is NOT the cause.
You didn't make this argument but I want to address it: I watch people who use vanilla Vim when they code (I can knock them because I tend to be one of them). What do they have on their other screen? A browser with some combination of google search tabs and Stackoverflow.com. What's on their terminal? One tab usually has a man (3) page up for shmemget() or something. A lot of what we're doing is looking up documentation for an API. I don't understand how this is somehow more "pure" than having that same documentation browsable in your editor and at your fingertips!
You're right; IDEs encourage lazy programming habits. But look again at that guy fumbling around with his mouse. Is he REALLY going to turn into a ninja command line wizard because you took his IDE away? Nope. He's going to continue to be mediocre no matter what tools you give him, because the underlying reason is deeper than the tools.
> You're right; IDEs encourage lazy programming habits.
Nonsense. You know what's lazy? Working on a project with millions of lines of code and deciding that digging through it to find the routine you need is more work than just coding it again.
My conspiracy theory is that editors that allow you to enter code real fast encourage a personal not-invented-here syndrome. Coding it yourself is faster than looking up how to use someone else's code (be it code by a team member or an open-source library). If the only way to use a lib is to read bad reference docs on the internet, or, god forbid, the source, and you're on vim/emacs/sublime, then sure, hack it together yourself. It's faster, more fun, and all the trouble caused by code duplication and added complexity is for your successors anyway. Not your problem! This why all PHP, Ruby and Python programmers build their own HTTP request router at some point in their career (I sure did).
On the other side, editors that make it very easy for you to discover and navigate code will encourage you to use existing code. Typing `someObject.` and getting a precise, documented and navigable list of exactly what you can do with that object. That causes you to use that object the way it was intended. Maybe refactor one of its methods so that it's more flexible or general. You wouldn't refactor a method that you don't know existed, right? Direct, at-your-fingertips insight in the code you use, and the code you wrote last month, encourages appropriate use of said code.
(Sidenote: of course there's absolutely no reason why an IDE can't have great text-editing keybindings. I suspect that the only reason most fakevim plugins for IDEs are mediocre is because the user group is so small. After all, the average vim/emacs user looks down on IDEs)
If your "million lines of code" project isn't well documented or designed, then relying on an IDE to find pieces of code doesn't really help.
It is also my "conspiracy theory" that because IDEs are so good at hiding the junk under the carpet, developers become sloppy and stop carrying about things like modularization and API design, immersing themselves into sloppy code and factories of factories. E.g. no project should ever get to millions of lines of code, because no developer is able to keep it in one's head, which is why monolithic code bases are a mess. If you're not splitting your project in multiple modules/libraries, you're doing it wrong.
And such users can't see it, because they are developing in languages in which IDE usage was encouraged from the start (e.g. C#, Java), so libraries are naturally developed with IDEs in mind, being really hard and frustrating to use them without an IDE, creating a vicious circle. It is also my opinion that IDE "users" (because seriously folks, many of you are not the kind of people that can adapt their environment to their needs, therefore you are just users) have never tried to develop in Vim or Emacs in combination with a potent REPL, plus the Unix toolchain. Unfortunately for you particularly, you'd also have to change languages and immerse yourself in the Unix culture for that to be a pleasant experience. But seriously, try it sometimes, you might just like it.
Note that I'm currently using IntelliJ IDEA, from the same guys that are delivering ReSharper, the plugin that makes Visual Studio usable. IntelliJ IDEA is a really potent IDE. But many times I hate it and I can't wait to get back full-time on Emacs, unfortunately I have to use IntelliJ because I'm dealing with Java's ecosystem right now. Well, at least Java has Maven and SBT.
And yes, I used Emacs for 8 years. You couldn't pay me enough to go back.
I've personally moved to Vim because I found that I like it, but I still have all the plugins that turn it right back into an IDE of sorts. I try to resist looking down on IDE users... I used IDEs for a long time and suffered no ill effects (that I know of).
Now you have me curious as to how you edit code.
Are there any screencasts or whatnot I can look at to see an expert developer demonstrating
I don't suppose you have any screencast or whatnot I can look at to see how someone codes how you code?
Visual Studio keybindings (even its emacs keybindings, whether or not they existing in 2013) are indeed pretty bad in places - as you note, it sometimes makes a distinction between the text editor and the UI widgets, so you do find yourself leaving home position regularly to move up and down a list, instead of C-n/C-p. But a lot of the problem is just people not bothering to learn what's available.
The IntelliSense has better defaults than you get with most emacs modes, which is possibly why people notice a difference (i.e. in VS you don't have to _do_ anything, it auto suggests, and completes on punctuation, and always pops up a lot of nice info, all out of the box). But I'm not sure there's anything there you can't achieve in emacs, depending on your language - certainly in Java with flymake and the eclipse compiler you can do some good stuff.
The huge gulf, for me, is with refactoring. Visual Studio with Resharper is vastly, vastly more intelligent, powerful and reliable than anything you've likely cooked up in emacs, even with semantic mode etc. And I think this unlocks a lot of productivity - sometimes a problem isn't just text, it's deeply tied to the semantics of your code, and in VS (again, I'm assuming nobody uses it without Resharper) you can be performing refactorings at a pretty high level without skipping a beat. In emacs, not so much. The degree to which that happens in your code is the degree to which you'll notice and become bothered by it.
Again, this is for OO languages. I would certainly like more refactoring power than I have with clojure today, but nothing that's so far above and beyond just day-to-day paredit that I've bothered.
In this case, IntelliSense gives you visibility into available methods and their signatures right in the environment. When working in a larger codebase (LLVM in my case), it's very helpful to not have to look up documentation. Then there are tools like ReSharper which you can think of as "higher-order editing" tools that understand the semantics of the code and use it as a basis for manipulation, rather than simply modifying the textual representation of the code.
Vim is great at manipulating text, but not as good at understanding the code. IDEs are worse at manipulating, but a bit better at the latter. For most things, I reach for Vim. For bigger code bases, I'm pretty happy in an IDE, as long as it stays out of my way.
IDEs like Visual Studio with Intellisense tell you your options when writing code. Text editors fundamentally do not have that capability. The end result is that you spend a lot of time looking through code manually ("the code is the documentation", etc.) figuring out the right arguments to call a function with and such, when in fact the editor could have just told you what you needed to know right in front of your face with zero effort on your part. That's lost productivity.
vi/Emacs' strength is text manipulation. But in IRL most C++ developers (on any platform) are NOT typing in reams of C++ code non-stop. I will often pause to think, look up documentation/reference books, maybe take down some notes or work out a problem on a whiteboard, or debug/step through code, etc. In short the vast vast majority of my time is spent away from the editor. Honestly I don't see how a C++ developer can objectively claim any time-savings with emacs vs a full fledged IDE like VS. YMMV with other languages.
Apart from VS I have recently heard some very nice things about Qt-Creator, but I haven't used it personally.
Surely you use autocomplete or typeahead in emacs, right? It's just about saving time.
Intellisense isn't "I dunno what I want so I'll wander around." It's "I know exactly what I want and want to type as little as possible." VS also supports Emmet/ZenCoding, which is an extreme example.
Here's a 3 min video where I show some CSS intellisense and editor features: http://www.asp.net/visual-studio/overview/2013/visual-studio...
Here's a 3 min one where I show the JavaScript engine running inside the editor itself and why that's useful: http://www.asp.net/visual-studio/overview/2013/visual-studio...
Eclipse is also gold standard in my book because the ecosystem around it is way much better than VS.
You do know that visual studio has been supporting multiple languages well before there even was a .net? It still continues to do so.
I only recalled it supported C/C++ (maybe ASM?) and VB derivatives.
In my experience, if you haven't tried IDEA, it's best not to claim VS's superiority. I mean, just look at the ReSharper page. All of those things are missing from VS for C# but not IntelliJ for Java.
Frankly, the two are simply not comparable.
Edit: Rereading, this seems combative. It isn't meant to be. Just try IntelliJ if you're working with Java. It's really good. I hope its features come to other IDEs as well.
There is also the VS.Php extension, but it's not free, and seems a little less polished.
On a related note, DevSense has also taken over development the Phalanger project (a PHP compiler/runtime for .NET). It's Apache 2.0-licensed and on GitHub if you're interested: https://github.com/DEVSENSE/Phalanger
DevSense does provide some free tools for VS if you're using Phalanger, maybe they'd be good enough for what you want: http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/419916fb-ec89-...
When it comes to the occasional PHP project, I just use an IDE geared toward PHP development. Admittedly, it has been a while, but when I tried using PHP extensions for VS in the past, debugging, unit tests, etc... all seemed to require a ton of effort or didn't quite work the way I wanted them to. I would have loved to use VS for all development, but in this case, I felt like the tool was too weighty and not quite compatible.
In my particular case, I use Netbeans because it is free, lightweight, and it just works. My projects are more portable to other non-VS developers and adding PHPDocs and PHPUnit support was really easy. I'm sure there are other good IDEs as well.
It really boils down to this - if you do plugin development for a product (Adobe's, Autodesk, etc.) or ffi-bindings for some language or environment, then you have to make sure you use the same CRT version as the host application.
And while statically linking to your CRT in your plugin DLL might work, it might not always - hopefully most people have found workarounds - for example not exposing "FILE*" or memory allocations/deallocations across DLL boundaries - e.g. alloc/free is done from the same DLL. But sometimes things like C++ exceptions make this even harder.
And now I'm seeing VS2013 brings yet another new CRT. Oh bummer!
-- You are paying $550+ per year ($45*12+tax) yet you don't own the software
-- What projects are you working on where, if the software locked you out (due to non-payment, error, server unavailable, etc), you would be okay with that?
-- Lastly, how secure do you feel the source code you upload is?
In the wake of the Adobe breach, it would seem that "The hackers accessed our users' source code, user details, and CC numbers." would be far worse than "The hackers accessed our old builds, user details, and CC numbers." In the former, I would think there are legal ramifications for many of you. For example, if you have a contract that states that you can't share source code with a 3rd party, yet you upload these files to MSFT (a 3rd party) and they get leaked, how will you protect yourself if a client files a breach of contract lawsuit?
Interesting times and all that.
And you're not owning the software even with a normal Visual Studio license. You just get the binary blob and a license to use it, not the source code. Using the cloud-based version, you don't get the binary blob, but does that make a difference?
http://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/products/visual-studio-onl...
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/somasegar/archive/2013/06/28/cpp-con...
They[1] say it's been resolved in 2013RC, but I don't see much improvement specially when you add the now-almost-standard extensions such as WebWorkbench and WebEssentials.
[1] http://visualstudio.uservoice.com/forums/121579-visual-studi...
I have ViEmu for older version of Visual Studio and looking at purchasing the new version.
I am thinking that I can possibly get by without ViEmu and just use VsVim the free extension. I don't particularly use all the advanced features of ViEmu.
Anyone have any thoughts on this at all?
ViEmu also has a more complete emulation. I prefer ViEmu, and own a license for it. Easily worth the price.
http://channel9.msdn.com/Series/Visual-Studio-Online-Monaco/...
The video shows how to clone a git repo containing a node.js/Express app and run it on Azure.