
Visual C++ Cross-Platform Mobile - amatheus
https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/explore/cplusplus-mdd-vs
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npalli
Microsoft, please port Visual studio to OS X.

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tacos
Visual Studio in even the shittiest, crufty Windows VM is a better experience
than Xcode. Seriously Apple, what is the deal?

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pmelendez
Shocking enough I have a couple of friends that _love_ XCode... I guess there
is room for everybody (Although I can't stand XCode either)

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TwoBit
There are so many things Xcode does worse than Visual Studio, and so few
things it does better. 5:1 ratio. Yesterday I was dealing with how Xcode's
disassembly mode debugging is so bad compared to VS that it's nearly unusable.

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piyush_soni
If it works good, this might do wonders for Microsoft's Windows phone app
store. They are surely hoping people will be willing to build and upload the
apps on their platform as well once they're written in an almost platform
independent manner.

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pjmlp
As I already mentioned in Reddit, this is great for those of us that enjoy
using Visual Studio.

If I would be part of the Android team I would feel bad to have Microsoft
providing a better developer experience than the team is able (willing) to
deliver to NDK users.

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malkia
When comes to ease of debugging Visual Studio is outstanding. Not the most
powerful debugger in the world (WinDBG is much more advanced), but it's my
experience is that it's easy to work with even for new people.

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revelation
In my mind, these two just occupy a very different niche. WinDBG is great when
you don't necessarily have the source or symbols at hand, where VS excels with
that information available.

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karmakaze
I'm quite suspect on how is 'cross-platform' feat is achieved. Non-UI code
shares well. As for the other: "Windows, iOS, and Android app development _"
... "_Free Microsoft extensions available for download for iOS and Android
development" may not as positive as it's spun to be.

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frozenport
If they can build Android apps, why cant they build desktop Linux apps? Or is
it doing something else?

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AlexeyBrin
You are confusing Android with desktop Linux, very different beasts. Just try
to open/create a graphical window on a typical Linux distro, after that try to
create a simple app on Android and you will understand.

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frozenport
As a practical matter they are quite different, but this is mostly a linking
problem. Both use ELF.

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AlexeyBrin
And _very_ different UIs. If by _desktop Linux_ you meant text based programs
(no GUIs) than I think, at least technically, it should be possible to use a
cross compiler toolchain (based on Clang) from VS 2015.

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Sanddancer
You'd have to make sure you statically link the program, because android uses
a different libc than most other linux distros.

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ori_b
Or you point the linker at a different libc.

I think the question isn't so much "Can I make VSC++ Android apps run on
Linux" so much as "Can I futz around with linker flags, and get a desktop
binary if I point it to the right runtime, start files, and so on?"

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brown9-2
Does anyone else find the use of "acquisition" a little weird here? I don't
think anyone ever talks how "easy this software is to acquire" when they talk
about features.

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bernadus_edwin
How office team build microsoft office mobile for iOS? As i know, they use c++
shared library. Which IDE on OSX they use?

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AlexeyBrin
You don't need to use an IDE (like Xcode) on OS X in order to compile standard
C++, a Makefile will do just fine. They've probably developed the C++ code on
Windows with Visual Studio and tested on Windows and OS X.

For the GUI part it depends, technically you don't need an IDE to create GUIs
on OS X. However, most people use Interface Builder from Xcode for this.

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mahyarm
Next up, full C++11 support? Windows is the laggard here.

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pjmlp
I guess you aren't aware of commercial UNIX (Aix, HP-UX...) and embedded
compilers support level.

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mahyarm
There is a difference between niche things like that, and being the most
installed full desktop os in the world. I repeatedly run into C++ projects
saying no C++11 because of windows, and only windows.

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pjmlp
I wouldn't consider computer systems that outnumber desktops as niche.

In any case, one takeaway from CppCon 2014 was that many companies only allow
for C++98, not even C++03, on their style guides.

I do hardly any C++ nowadays, but as one of my favourite languages, that
saddens me.

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wehadfun
Why C++ instead of C#?

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po1nter
They'd be competing with Xamarin if they did that.

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jmkni
I think this is Xamarin, it's mentioned once on the page:

> ...or use these C++ libraries to build complete Xamarin Android Native or
> Java Native Interface applications.

It's a little unclear though

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AlexeyBrin
It is no Xamarin here! What they say is that you can use these C++ libraries
from Xamarin or directly from Java (with JNI).

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mox1
So it looks like this targets Windows and Android only (maybe iOS via
Xamarin...?)

For an alternative the Poco C++ libraries[1] work on Android, iOS and Windows
out of the box. Probably not as full featured and you obviously can't use
existing Visual C++ code..., but its Open Source and mostly just works.

[1] [http://pocoproject.org/](http://pocoproject.org/)

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plorkyeran
A set of libraries is not an alternative to an IDE.

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fit2rule
Meh, you know what - this is a bold move of Microsoft, and its quite
compelling to see how they have embraced the platform-ology that must be
embraced in mobile, these days. I applaud the effort.

But the tricky part of all of this is that so much of the mobile space is more
common than people think. Glomming one platform on the other is sort of de-
rigeur, in mobile - as it has (and still is and always will be) been on
desktop, in the server space, and so on. Tricky thing: you can Run X on A if
you use Y and A to make/build/run X. Got Y?

Microsoft: please port Visual Studio to all platforms, including my iPad,
kthxbai..

