
Visual Studio 2013 - Tatyanazaxarova
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/bharry/archive/2013/06/03/visual-studio-2013.aspx
======
CoolGuySteve
I wish they would dedicate more time to improving cl.exe and link.exe in terms
of performance and language support and less time with these hokey team
visualization gimics.

Every release since 2008 has been getting slower and slower for C++, the C
compiler is awful, PGO instrumentation in Win8 is less capable, and there's no
equivalents in the Windows ecosystem to gcc's likely/unlikely, oprofile, or
valgrind.

It's at the point now where developing on Windows vs Linux is a serious
performance and security impediment due to their withering native toolchain.
But I guess nobody over there gets promoted for fixing the hard stuff.

~~~
sriramk
ex-VS person here (from 5 years ago though).

It is never an either-or. It is always a complex mix of what customers ask
for, what the strategic priorities/market realities are.

Often the problem with these queries is that there are not enough devs
complaining to MSFT. No PM/engg manager is going to ignore a bug/problem if it
shows up high in customer requests.

On promotions - I think it's the reverse problem. People only get promoted for
working on something that's perceived to be hard.

~~~
cpeterso
Mozilla has been fighting the MSVC linker's 3GB virtual address space limit
for years. Mozilla has asked Microsoft for a 64-bit linker that can produce
32-bit code, but Microsoft apparently has no plans for such a configuration.

[https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!topic/mozilla.d...](https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!topic/mozilla.dev.platform/wLHTg_moymM)

~~~
dthunt
What I want to know is how someone can see that their software project has
become unlinkable on a 32-bit OS and somehow think that this is purely a
compiler problem.

~~~
terrymah
I'm actually about to sit down and write a blog post about VS compiler memory
issues, and I had a long talk with the Firefox guys a few weeks ago about this
issue. It's not all their fault.

~~~
dthunt
Awesome - where's it likely to get posted?

~~~
terrymah
Visual C++ Team blog

------
GravityWell
No mention at all about missing C++11 features. I hope their continued silence
is not an indicator of nothing to come. [http://cpprocks.com/c11-compiler-
support-shootout-visual-stu...](http://cpprocks.com/c11-compiler-support-
shootout-visual-studio-gcc-clang-intel/)

It should be noted that features listed as included in the VS2012 Nov CTP,
such as initializer lists, variadic templates, etc., should not in my view be
listed. The CTP does not work via the Visual Studio interface, but only from
the command line compiler. And the CTP is not included in either Update 1 or
Update 2.

Meanwhile GCC and Clang are both feature complete:
[http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTM1N...](http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTM1NTg)
[http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/GCC-4-8-1-is-C-11-fea...](http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/GCC-4-8-1-is-C-11-feature-
complete-1875093.html)

~~~
icesoldier
From the article: _"I will not, in this post, be talking about many of the new
VS 2013 features that are unrelated to the Application Lifecycle workflows."_

It seems that the OP talked about what the blog's focus was first, then will
come in later (maybe on a different blog?) to talk about anything else.

------
jblow
Yet another Visual Studio, yet another truckload of "features" that do nothing
to help day-to-day, heavy-lifting programmers. (And which probably help by
adding bugs or just bloating the system). Sigh.

I am hoping they have made substantial improvements that are not mentioned in
this blog post.

~~~
gokhan
Try R# with VS.

~~~
pointyhats
Try R# with VS in a solution with 54 projects and ~ 1.5MLOC...

It stinks!

~~~
trust-me
Are you serious? That's a medium size project, just get a fast machine (e.g.
i7 4770) and you'll be perfectly fine.

~~~
pointyhats
I've got an 8 core 3.0 Xeon with 32Gb RAM and Samsung 840. It's still slow.

It's more latency than long waits but it's enough to stop me using it.

~~~
trust-me
8 core Xeon would be good at video rendering, but as of now for VS and R# you
need single threaded performance, where a 3.9GHz Haswell shines.

------
SideburnsOfDoom
As someone who uses reharper to make the IDE cool, git for source control,
teamcity for builds, nunit for C# tests, mocha and testacular for js tests,
and a goddamn whiteboard, cards, pens, and blue-tack for "agile portfolio
management", I'm not seeing a lot here that interests me.

I'm underwhelmed with the desire to suck all activities into the one tool to
rule them all. Especially when it rules them from _bleh_ TFS.

I want VS to let me write code. I want to find and manipulate text. I want it
to compile fast and produce relevant warnings. I want a debugger. I want it to
host duiverse plugins. That's mostly it. ALM? I'm probably doing whatever it
is that you mean by that and I don't care about integrated tools for it.

~~~
MartinCron
_I want VS to let me write code. I want to find and manipulate text. I want it
to compile fast and produce relevant warnings. I want a debugger. I want it to
host duiverse plugins. That's mostly it._

That's all I want Visual Studio for, too. Fortunately those things will
continue to work and we can continue to ignore things like TFS and mstest.

~~~
jmcqk6
It would be really nice if you could strip the things out of VS that you don't
want. For me, all I really want is the code editor, R#, NCrunch, nuget, and
the debugger. There might be a few other things that I didn't think of right
away. I personally prefer to do source code management (git) outside of the
IDE, because I find visual studio doesn't tend to make good choices about what
should be controlled.

If I could make VS just do those things and nothing else, that would be really
nice.

~~~
MartinCron
I strip down the UI a lot. I don't have any toolbars visible, for example.
It's not exactly the same thing, but I have no complaints, really.

------
evo_9
Way way way way, WAY too soon Microsoft... most shops, including my current
employer aren't even on 2012 yet... Honestly I prefer VS to be tied to desktop
OS releases or SQL release or something other than yearly.

This is not a Madden game, nobody is asking for yearly updates for Visual
Studio.

~~~
vyrotek
Seriously! My company has been keeping up with the latest stuff but I have
hard time understanding what the justification was behind releasing a whole
new Visual Studio version. Are there new features that won't be available in
VS 2012? I guess we'll see at the Build conference.

~~~
pjmlp
Update 3 was the last one.

Maybe Microsoft is tight on money. :)

~~~
trust-me
VS is not there to make money directly, but to sell MS platforms - Windows,
SQL Server, etc. They give it away for free to students, startups and pretty
much anybody who asks. The only reason all editions are not free is to not
kill the other commercial Windows IDEs.

~~~
pjmlp
Really? You don't have to pay for licenses I imagine.

------
vyrotek
I'm actually a bit relieved to see a new version of VS so soon. The Entity
Framework team said that v6 would come out with the "New" Visual Studio and I
was wondering how long that would be. Apparently it's a lot closer than I
thought.

~~~
tracker1
Personally, it's a bit unnerving to see a new version instead of another
update so soon imho... an upgrade is nicer than having yet another version of
VS installed... the VS installer installs so many bits and pieces, it's nearly
impossible to get rid of all of the last version to upgrade to the new one.

I'd rather see a 2012.3 version... I'd also like to see a _LOT_ more
stability, as well as a non-building project (for external systems) that still
has a pre/post-build event, but no compile step from inside VS... (mainly for
projects that use other runtimes/build systems but make sense to include in a
VS solution.

------
angersock
And yet, still no formalized C99 support.

I know everybody is hot and bothered about C++11, but honestly I'd suggest
just getting proper support for things we've needed for a decade or so before
chasing the new shiny.

~~~
pjmlp
Have you missed the news? C is dead on Microsoft tooling, they have deprecated
it.

[http://herbsutter.com/2012/05/03/reader-qa-what-about-vc-
and...](http://herbsutter.com/2012/05/03/reader-qa-what-about-vc-and-c99/)

~~~
stephencanon
I prefer to think of it as "Microsoft tooling is dead", since C continues to
work just fine.

~~~
jlarocco
Either way, C99 in Visual C++ isn't happening, so why beat a dead horse?

~~~
angersock
For the same reason people still push Python 3...hope.

------
MichaelGG
Fingers crossed that this will also include a good version bump to the CLR and
take .NET tech up a notch, rather than just tooling.

------
volandovengo
Former member of the Visual Studio ALM team here.

ALM is that is where the money is. Higher-ups in orgs are much more willing to
pay for oversight and management features than language features.

------
hkmurakami
I was asked to renew our expiring VS licenses at my previous role, and was all
but paralyzed by the bevy of options and bundles available.

What is the motivation behind having 10+ bundle and service options? Is it to
trick us into buying the wrong thing, then forcing us to buy other addons that
we initially didn't realize we needed? Is it an attempt to maximize sales by
offering tons of bundle options to extract the maximum value out of the
variety of customer needs that exist out there?

I guess shops that are even looking to buy VS are so locked into VS that we
_will_ spend the cognitive energy to figure out where the best value is for
our needs, but this current method just doesn't seem elegant or efficient to
me.

~~~
forgotAgain
_What is the motivation behind having 10+ bundle and service options?_

Maximize revenues.

The trick is that many users will opt for the most expensive option because
they don't understand or are intimidated by the marketing / licensing material
and therefore make the safest choice. If you don't know what you need ( and
most large corporate shops don't) you buy everything.

Having lower priced options mostly serves to hide the true costs of the
product.

------
lawnchair_larry
Does anyone happen to know if it supports inline assembly (64 bit) yet?

~~~
CoolGuySteve
They don't support inline assembly because it messes with the register
allocation in their compiler. It's likely they'll never support it because of
this. :(

~~~
glhaynes
I'm not a compiler guy, but wouldn't this be true for any compiler?

------
Associat0r
How about improving F# support?

------
wcdolphin
Link is down for me.

Server Error in '/' Application.

Runtime Error

Description: An application error occurred on the server. The current custom
error settings for this application prevent the details of the application
error from being viewed remotely (for security reasons). It could, however, be
viewed by browsers running on the local server machine.

Details: To enable the details of this specific error message to be viewable
on remote machines, please create a <customErrors> tag within a "web.config"
configuration file located in the root directory of the current web
application. This <customErrors> tag should then have its "mode" attribute set
to "Off".

<!-- Web.Config Configuration File -->

<configuration> <system.web> <customErrors mode="Off"/> </system.web>
</configuration>

------
sergiotapia
Those tools look very nice, but it's a shame they run against TFS. Plus the
entire toolset must cost what, 4000$ per license?

------
Create
[http://www.charlespetzold.com/etc/doesvisualstudiorotthemind...](http://www.charlespetzold.com/etc/doesvisualstudiorotthemind.html)

------
forgotAgain
So what's the new data access paradigm?

------
chiph
That was fast.

~~~
r4vik
menu still shouting

~~~
mischanix
I don't mind it. It's not like it's high-contrast, large font, or bold, it
just serves as a heading for the menus they show without making the font large
or bold.

It's definitely nowhere near as annoying as intellisense randomly breaking and
putting a red line underneath half your statements.

~~~
acqq
> intellisense randomly breaking and putting a red line underneath half your
> statements

There's a reasonably simple solution with which you can solve the red line
problem, if you're talking about the C and C++ projects:

[http://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/details/5...](http://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/details/533605/stdafx-
h-cant-be-parsed-with-intellisense-squiggles-mechanism)

"Posted by JoeWoodbury on 25/02/2010 at 10:16 (...)

The solution is to add the location of the stdafx.h file to the include path
list. This is often a matter of simply putting a dot comma (.,) as the very
first item in a projects include list."

~~~
mischanix
It happens regardless of precompiled headers, so I don't think that's the
issue. I do think it's an include problem, but I don't know why.

~~~
acqq
It's precompiled headers and it can be proved: If you would try to turn off
precompiled headers in your project and rebuild it, the compilation would fail
in all the files in which you see the red lines. It's because your project has
subfolders and the files in the subfolders reach stdafx only by accident of
having the "use precompiled headers" turned on. So once you fix the include
path, and that you can do on the project level, your project will compile
independently of "use precompiled headers" settings and the intellisense would
work too. I know from experience, I fixed the big projects on which I worked.

EDIT v2: Looking at the project you cited in the reply of this message and the
file: [http://code.google.com/p/freetype-
gl/source/browse/trunk/dem...](http://code.google.com/p/freetype-
gl/source/browse/trunk/demo-font.c) on the computer on which I don't have VS,
I still have an idea what the reason for such errors are: the project authors
use something like:

    
    
         #elif defined(_WIN32) || defined(_WIN64)
    

Now think about it: when intellisense parses the file, can it assume you're
building a 32-bit version? No. Can it assume you're building a 64-bit version?
No. So intellisense doesn't use the header inside that elif at all. Setting
defines in the project can fix that.

~~~
mischanix
I'm not using PCH in the most recent example. I've been playing with this
project: <http://code.google.com/p/freetype-gl/> , so it includes Freetype,
GLUT (using freeglut), and opengl stuff. Builds fine, intellisense lines
everywhere.

------
frozenport
Will we get variadic templates so that

I can std::thread(a,b,c,d,e,f,g) more than 5 arguments?

------
lenkite
Still No C99... _sobs_

------
brokenparser
All these wonderful tools and they still can't release an operating system
that's worth a single plugged nickel.

