Re: Thanks Microsoft

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OK, I'm going to play a role of devil advocate, since some of your claims are not correct. (I'll talk about VC++2005.)

"Michael" wrote:
My opinion is that there is far too much emphasis on
bells and whistles and very little on the basics.

Define bells and whistles and basics. One developer's bells and whistles are the other developer's basics.

Example: Visual Studio 6
had a feature called the Source Browser that permitted you to browse every
occurrent of every variable , local and global. [...]
With VS2003 and VS2005 it was replaced with a poor and very buggy imitation.

I beg to differ. Object Browse info is still there. It is disabled by default, but can be enabled here: Project Properties -> Configuration properties -> C/C++ Browse Information. Moreover, in my opinion, it is greatly improved in comparison with VC++6.0:

* Object Browser is unified for all languages and allows to browse across several projects (no matter which langue was used for a project) and modules.

* Now I can define custom component set for Object Browser and include not only .BSC files from wherever I want, but also a type info from COM libraries and .NET assemblies.

* Search for a symbol is very handy (the result list is trimmed as you type). Visibility of symbols can be altered by several built-in filters in Object Browser.

* BSCMAKE.EXE is more robust and can lift much heavier projects now. In VC++6.0 it was choking all the time when a project had many files or files were too big.

* IntelliSense is much better. It replaces Object Browser on many occasions.

Something is wrong with the priorities here. I don't care
about bells and whistles. I just want a development environment that works
and does the basics well (Visual Studio 6 did that).

I think that MS products are balanced quite well regarding priorities. Of course there are flaws, no product is perfect. I suggest you to try alternative products (Borland's, open source or whatever). You will discover that despite all its defects, Visual Studio still is one of the best development environments available on the market.

I constantly write macros, ad-ons and extensions for VS. Speaking about extensibility and modularity VS2005 is light years ahead of VS6. I remember doing it for VS6. It was a royal PITA, to say the least. I willingly will trade a hundred of features of "Find All References" scale for VS2005 IDE DOM, for instance. So, I for one, am perfectly happy with VS team priorities.

I know a lot of developers that feel the
same way about Visual Studio 6 as I do. It was much easier to use and the
basics worked very well.

I think that these developers defend their old habits, nothing more. I'm fine with that. However, once I tried VS2005, its debugger, code editor and many other features, I won't return to VS6. Also, I won't accept any job offer from a company if their main development still is done with 10 years old tools.

Alex

.

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