Visual Studio cross platform is now released, and free!!!

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OrangeDragon
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Visual Studio cross platform is now released, and free!!!

Post by OrangeDragon »

Free community edition of Visual Studio, a Microsoft development environment that in my experience is one of the most powerful ever made, that now can run on Linux and iOS. This is a HUGE step for MS in moving into the open source community. Also the new version can create apps/sites in .net that will run on Android/Linux/iOS! This is massive for anyone in the .net development world, and really it's massive for anyone who develops on those platforms it they'll let their MS hatred bias take a break for a moment and really check out Visual Studio. I've worked in VisualStudio, PHPStorm, SublimeText, Eclipse, and so on. Nothing has compared to VisualStudio in terms of tools and productivity increase.

Super stoked to try it out on my MacBook.
clippy
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Re: Visual Studio cross platform is now released, and free!!

Post by clippy »

you mean OSX right? unless you can program on an iphone
BOFH
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Re: Visual Studio cross platform is now released, and free!!

Post by BOFH »

I understand that .NET developers are psyched to be able to develop on other platforms. What they need to understand is that the Linux/Mac communities are not necessarily equally psyched about having .NET code running on those platforms. Nothing has compared to VisualStudio in terms of tools and productivity increase, you say. Frankly, we've had vim, emacs, gdb, sed, awk, grep and friends for decades. My shell is literally the only IDE I have ever needed, would that mean that I am unproductive to you? I don't understand what exact need VisualStudio satisfies, besides .NET developers' missing POSIX bridge. I'm skeptical. There is a blog post written by someone who put it a much better way than I could: http://blog.expensify.com/2011/03/25/ce ... ogrammers/

Not sure why this is such a big step for Microsoft in terms of open source. Microsoft has been contributing more to the Linux kernel for years than Canonical, the company responsible for Ubuntu, has.
OrangeDragon
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Re: Visual Studio cross platform is now released, and free!!

Post by OrangeDragon »

BOFH wrote: Frankly, we've had vim, emacs, gdb, sed, awk, grep and friends for decades. My shell is literally the only IDE I have ever needed, would that mean that I am unproductive to you? I don't understand what exact need VisualStudio satisfies, besides .NET developers' missing POSIX bridge. I'm skeptical.
Hahaah, i know a LOT of developers who have said the same thing until they have a real IDE and are working on massive applications hundreds of thousands of lines of code deep.

Intellisense, refactoring tools, compile time exception notification as you write the code (not at the end when you try to compile it), step through debugging, macro builders for automating repetitive tasks (wrapping a text block in strings comes to mind as one i use a lot), code template automation (example: build a property and it gens the getter/setter code for you automatically rather than you typing it... keystrokes save), refactoring tools (highlight a block of code inside of a method and tell it to extract it as it's own method so it can be reused... does so and replaces it with a call to that method), and so on... loads of things that definitely speed up productivity. So yes, I would say you're not being as productive as you could be with a real IDE. And of those, I'd say VS takes the cake.

The "i only need a text editor/shell" ego thing is rather locked in with a specific type of programmers though... usually even more religiously than their OS fetishes.

It's not (just) about running .net apps on nix/etc. It's about a better tool for writing in the native languages on those platforms. Even just as a PHP development tool it far exceeds PHPStorm (I have both, and have used both extensively... VS at home and Storm at the office).

As for your link... I honestly have trouble taking this guy seriously. He seems to not actually know anything about .NET. His whole "can't go off the menu" thing is dead wrong. At it's heart anything you can do in C++ you can do in C#, including invoking a C++ library if needed. It shows more a passive aggressive closed mindedness to MS (as I mentioned in my OP) than an actual understanding of the framework and an educated evaluation of it. Or perhaps just a fear of more productive developers usurping him?
eriksank
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Re: Visual Studio cross platform is now released, and free!!

Post by eriksank »

OrangeDragon wrote:Also the new version can create apps/sites in .net that will run on Android/Linux/iOS!
It's been tried before. Miguel de Icaza wanted to push dot.net into Gnome:

http://www.linuxuser.co.uk/features/mon ... are-column

For a thousand different reasons this was never likely to happen. Users didn’t like it, and neither did the developers, and not simply for coding reasons. The idea wasn’t well received. “making GNOME depend on Mono is running a grave risk, and a grave mistake.”

Furthermore, distributions like Debian, Mint, or even Ubuntu will not carry that kind of applications. The build procedures for these apps will simply not fit into the automated build farms that the distributions use to produce their packages. The very first thing these distributions do, by the way, is to build to the compilers and script engines from source. It is undoubtedly not possible to configure, make, make install Visual Studio. This is how we install a tool from a typical distribution (such as Debian):

# will never happen ...
$ sudo apt-get install visual-studio

The debian repos will never, ever carry Visual Studio, because it is not open source. Given the decades-old distrust against Microsoft, you can reasonably assume that even a fully open-sourced Visual Studio published under the GPL, would be rejected.
OrangeDragon wrote:Nothing has compared to VisualStudio in terms of tools and productivity increase.
The only productivity gain could be in the fact that Visual Studio generates things that function as makefiles and that its users do not have to write their own makefile. This is indeed an important productivity increase for people who are not capable of writing their own makefiles. For people who are happy to write their own makefiles, it is not a productivity increase, but rather a distraction.

I use gedit, because it does nice syntax colouring and handles tabbed windows -- and then a terminal window to build and test. It's quite a spartan setup. I consider anything else to be unneeded and unwanted distractions.

Concerning C# or even java, I don't like those languages. They are not blazingly fast as C and they carry too much ceremony to be useful in places where I would use a scripting language.

Furthermore, there is no foundation anywhere for the idea that "everything is an object". You see, we have the Dedekind-Peano axiomatization that claims that everything is a number. We have Zermelo-Fraenkel building a Turing-complete mirror of that theory, entirely based on sets. We have Alonso Church building another Turing-complete mirror, entirely based on functions. So, statements that say that everything is a number, a set, or a function are actually true in a mathematical sense.

Nobody has ever demonstrated, however, that an alternative axiomatization based objects would be viable. Seriously, that kind of questions are mathematical problems. So, where is the math? Therefore, I can only look with contempt at people spreading corporate ideologies such as "pure java" in which they insist that everything should be shoehorned into objects.
OrangeDragon
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Re: Visual Studio cross platform is now released, and free!!

Post by OrangeDragon »

And I've used text editors for coding... and know those who swear by them. They're slow.

You'll never convince the people who only use them how slow they are. But they are. Code folding, refactoring method extraction, single click jumps to function/variable definitions from places where they are referenced, project templates... not to mention breakpoint debugging instead of echoing/logging/printing out all of your values to try and guess where things went sideways. The ways in which a rich IDE speed up development of any large project are almost too many to count.

On the flip side they don't make as much sense for a little 200 line script... sure. There's no sense in writing a full on application for some tasks. In those cases vi makes sense... or whatever text editor you chose to use. Hell, even for mods to this site I tend to lean on a text editor since it's just a line added here and changed there. But if i were creating this platform from scratch? Nah, I'd want something that allowed me to jump around quickly for references, refactor fast, and debug (with changes) as it runs.

To the Object Oriented debate... well... a priest and a rabbi sit down at a computer...

Some people subscribe to it, others don't, no one is right or wrong. Both are completely valid in their own ways and both get the job done.
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vladimir
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Re: Visual Studio cross platform is now released, and free!!

Post by vladimir »

OD posted! OD posted!

Somebody start a thread on guns!

:D

Welcome back! :thumb:
Jesus loves you...Mexico is great, right? ;)
OrangeDragon
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Re: Visual Studio cross platform is now released, and free!!

Post by OrangeDragon »

vladimir wrote:OD posted! OD posted!

Somebody start a thread on guns!

:D

Welcome back! :thumb:
Been busy working on my retirement plans. Hopefully by this time 2017 (or sooner) I'll be back in the kingdom not having to worry about working anymore. Free to work on my own projects, or my tan, as I choose.
eriksank
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Re: Visual Studio cross platform is now released, and free!!

Post by eriksank »

OrangeDragon wrote:Code folding, refactoring method extraction, single click jumps to function/variable definitions from places where they are referenced
These things definitely exist as separate tools. They have their afficionados, but the vast majority of programmers programming on linux does not use them. There's even a large group that will only use vim.
OrangeDragon wrote:... not to mention breakpoint debugging instead of echoing/logging/printing out all of your values to try and guess where things went sideways.
I think exactly the same as Linus Torvalds about debuggers: Linus Torvalds on debuggers
I don't like debuggers. Never have, probably never will...None of the arguments for a kernel debugger has touched me in the least... "it would be so much easier to do development, and we'd be able to add new things faster." And quite frankly, I don't care. I don't think kernel development should be "easy". I do not condone single-stepping through code to find the bug. ... people have given up on Linux kernel programming because it's too hard
and too time-consuming ... And nobody has explained to me why these are _bad_ things? To me, it's not a bug, it's a feature. Not only is it documented, but it's _good_, so it obviously cannot be a bug ... Without a debugger, you tend to think about problems another way. You want to understand things on a different _level_. And quite frankly, for most of the real problems ... a debugger doesn't much help.
OrangeDragon wrote:The ways in which a rich IDE speed up development of any large project are almost too many to count.
On my own system, I see:
$ dpkg --get-selections | wc -l
3728
That is, the entire operating system with all its applications consists of 3728 packages written by 100 000+ different people. Creating a "large" package is not particularly encouraged in this context. The idea is rather to reuse existing packages and build on top of those. A "large" project pretty much sounds like someone spending ages trying to reinvent the wheel, because most of the functionality will inevitably already exist in existing packages. On Windows, that behaviour is normal, because there are no packages and there is no package system, the reason being that the licensing regime on Windows does not allow to reuse packages built by others.

The greatest productivity gain is made when you do not need to write the code, simply because someone else has written it already. In that respect, Visual Studio programmers work in a zero-productivity environment.
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