VC++ 2005 Express, Ladybug and me

b.gr reflects about Visual C++ 2005 Express Beta and the MSDN Feedback Center.

This entry was first published on July 30, 2004, 06:32 AM, CET and categorized as Code.

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Well, first I thought I did not want to participate in another beta program (active Klient beta tester, signed up for the WoW European beta and overall tester for my own stuff) but I could not resist to install the Visual C++ 2005 Express Beta (VCE) to try out the new CLI/C++. Being currently tired but not tired enough to fall asleep (insomnia anyone?) I decided that writing about my first impressions on VCE would be less harm :)

IDE

Random comments on IDE changes:

  • The new Class View duality is definitely something to get used to - I was desperate enough to file a suggestion on this. While it still feels strange it seems like the Sort By Member Type in the Members Pane could work for me; but the objects of my current experiments are not complex enough to be sure on this and the lack of ATL/MFC support in VCE kind of disables the use of existing projects to try this out.
  • The reduction of code outlining seems nice. I only notice the lower number of pluses in the gutter recently as I did not use outlining extensively before.
  • Gradients are overused. Gradients are nice in the toolbars, tabs etc. but they are ugly for pane backgrounds (e.g. in the toolbox) and my system colours make text hard to read.
  • Not supporting source control integration in VCE is not a good choice (see No Source Control Integration in Visual Studio 2005 "Express" Editions for reasons). But the options UI is present currently…
  • The VCE IDE seems to be true beta: commands that are (according to MSDN) not supported in C++ but still present in the UI and commands that do nothing or cause errors.
  • The new way to handle tabs that do not fit into the tab channel looks nice but might be bad to the expected order.

CLI/C++

Definitely nice. No underscore orgies like in MC++ anymore. Now C++ feels like a native language for .NET and not like a language in a bad fitting corsage :) Regardless to the picky IntelliSense in VCE it does make fun to program for .NET in C++. Visit C++ Potential for details of this beauty.

MSDN Feedback Center experience

The MSDN Feedback Center is nice and easy to use (apart form the passport session timeouts). The transparency it adds to the development of VS is impressing, especially as the response come from the developers rather than some marketing/customer relations/management people. And being able to help to improve the quality of an essential application while being able to track the status of interesting issues is just great.

The responses to my reports were, hm, at least not too discouraging; well, apart from The bad but for that I blame the lacking report. And The known resulted in some sort of hesitation for future reports as the issue did not show up in the enforced search nor is it mentioned in the VCE readme. Connecting this with The requested one, the readme's notice on the Add-in Manager disappearance in Beta 2 and the obvious uselessness of the Code Snippets Manager in a standalone VCE (MSDN notes that code snippets are not supported in C++) should result in a duplicate/known issue, too� or not? Is it even a bug or just worth a suggestion? And what would it be about anyway?

The numbers posted in My Thoughts on the MSDN Feedback Center are pretty interesting. Why? I have no clue :) Well, maybe because seeing half of the public reported resolved bugs are fixed. Would I like to see more? Sure. One thing that I would like to know is some kind of quality measurement of the bugs reported through the MSDN Feedback Center.

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