This maybe it is in context of Windows 10 launch when the impression was a bit of a buggy release (and with the fact that some families of video cards are not even supported, like NVidia 4xx cards or older) Visual Studio got a much less attention.
I think this is right for most users, but on the other hand I do feel that this release is extraordinarily... strange. It is outstanding with some features like including of profiling tools even in Community Edition (the profiling tools are limited but still much better ones than the previous not- included ones).
The first impression I had was many fold positive:
- C# 6 which looks to me like a streamline version of itself which was forgot basically from the times of .Net 3.5/VS 2008 (that come with Linq and var keyword). Making code to be less repetitive is an amazing stuff. If you have time to listen for more than one hour, this presentation is excellent. Please push in your company to use C# 6, that excluding if you use string interpolation, doesn't require any .Net support. I'm not a VB.Net guy and I cannot comment much, but I expect to be good stuff here also.
- Roslyn idea even it was as a part of NRefactory for years, it is really well implemented at least that as you type you can see very reliably if your code has errors. No full build to see if are failures. This is really a huge timesaver in itself. This "language service" which is exposed as an open API will make that C# will not have strange behaviors in completion, especially if you will use future versions of CodeRush or JustCode. I love Resharper, but it is still great to know that Roslyn will be part of future SharpDevelop and MonoDevelop release
- .Net 4.6 comes with awesome improvements, I would expect in future to see releases like Paint.Net or photo image manipulation programs or some entry level video games to support SIMD libraries. They come for free, but there is a caveat for now. It still has some obscure bugs (which to be fair, are to be expected) especially if you run F#. The reason why only F# appears to be affected is in part natural, it is because F# requires to allow "tail call optimization" which in turn changes recursive calls into loops. Without it many F# programs can either run with "stack overflow" or have very ugly performance profile. So don't rush for now to run it into your production server, or do it only for your VB.Net/C# code
- even I'm not a C++ developer, it looks that Visual Studio supports very well C++ standards, which again is a great achievement, so you can target with one C++ codebase basically all platforms (like iOS, Android and Windows) without strange #define
As a .Net developer I am still disappointed with .Net which looks today excluding for web stacks (and even there the solution was mostly made as a response of NodeJS/small web servers from Ruby or Java world) so it looks as a desktop tool incoherent. I honestly don't know a Microsoft stack that I can support more than one platform, even in Microsoft's ecosystem. WPF is decent, they patch it, but it looks to me is like an MFC which runs on top of DirectX9. Not DirectX12.
Even more strange is when you install Visual Studio it comes with no package to develop with .Net on other platforms (like Mono) so up to the point that NRefactory is stable enough, your C#6 code you run will run only on Windows or on Linux as an CoreCLR .Net distribution, but not on Mono. This is kind of a bummer if you ask me.
Even more, and this is in fact not a rant against WPF, but as they improved VB and C# (and C++ for that matter, and F#) why they didn't improve Xaml. Xaml is an horrible language, if you can name it so. It has various framework conventions which are almost always broken. You add on this that WPF platform without (and even with) custom controls runs slow with more than some thousands of items. The reason is not that is not GPU accelerated or are GPU drivers faults, or that DirecX9 drivers are not to the snuff, but because when you profile WPF applicaiton, you will see that the internal layouting is hogging the CPU.
If you add other and other issues, it looks to me that if you want to written an application that is for example cross platform, you have mostly Xamarin solutions (MonoGame, Xwt, Gtk#, Xamarin.Forms, and so on) which is at least for me a bit strange.
What I would hope that the VS+1 will support in no particular order:
- polish the software more: it looks to me that Microsoft has right now quality issues all over the products. Complex software is hard, but working little by little and releasing with two features less will make the environment more nice. Not sure about other uses, but at least under Windows 10 but with latest updates, I had fairly many freezes and crashes. I definitely had much fewer under latest releases, but from time to time I still have "blue screen ;) " in Windows or VS hanging sometimes. Especially under debugging situations
- give a clear vision about which frameworks are supported by Microsoft. I'm talking here WPF in particular, but I think that many other frameworks (which include WCF, Silverlight, even the original WinRT code) are either not well exposed or not clear when or how they are supported. This makes very hard for some developers (like myself) if I would have an idea of a startup to start with Windows for a two years project. Java even it is worse technically (in many ways it is worse), I know that they don't let freeze some features, and most of them are in the open. Visual Studio comes with tools from editing Html, to C++ coding for Android. It looks to me like a dinosaur, but maybe is my limited judgement
- should not try to put under one IDE all languages/platforms. And the reason why is that VS is not an open platform like Eclipse. People will not extend it to make CAD modelling out of it. Even it lets you unselect them, by default are to many things included. Features do not matter only by count, but by making a sane experience for users. Use NuGet for adding language services.
- this maybe is easier to say than to do: start with TypeScript and make a .Net language that resemble it. Make a very light language similar with Swift to work for both "Desktop" and "Web" world. C# is really better in my view than Java (which was competing with) but to be fair JetBrains' Kotlin language is definitely more usable. Ruby (excluding that Ruby is not strongly typed) is again more usable than C#. But the "static version" of Mozilla Rust looks really promising and is clearly high performance. Maybe the starting point should be Visual Basic.Net but remove the legacy and make similarly a C# without the legacy. To be forced for example to not iterate without IEnumerable, and you will have to create a separate code (similar with what C# developers write with "unsafe" code) for people who still want C#.
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