12 replies to this topic

[Nick]

Hi all,

Microsoft released Visual Studio 2008 recently, as well as the Express Editions.

I've downloaded it but haven't tried it yet. I'm fine with Visual Studio 2005 for now and don't want things to mix up. But if you have tried it then I'd love to hear your opinion.

Cheers,

Nicolas

[bladder]

Wow, that's a nice web display they have there ... That partnership they have with the game creators is particularly interesting. Have you tried it out since you posted? I found this which doesnt mention any particularly amazing changes, but:

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The /MP option can significantly reduce the total time to compile several source files by creating several processes that compile the files simultaneously. This option is especially useful on computers that support hyperthreading, multiple processors, or multiple cores.

That sounds great. I wonder if it makes a noticable difference though.
Plus, not having to download the platform SDK seperately has got to be handy as well.

I read that TR1 won't be available till sometime in early 2008 though...

[.oisyn]

That /MP option already exists in 2005 . DOn't use it if you have hyperthreading, it won't compile that much faster but it will make your PC very unresponsive. Luckily, monday I'll be upgrading from a P4 3.2GHz to a quad core Q6600 (2.4 GHz per core) at work, so I can't wait to try out the multicore compile option

But about 2008, from what I've heared of it, the IDE is even slower than 2005 :/

[Kenneth Gorking]

With regards to the IDE, they have done a lot to improve it's responsiveness: http://blogs.msdn.co...n-visual-c.aspx

[Nick]

.oisyn said:

But about 2008, from what I've heared of it, the IDE is even slower than 2005 :/

VS2005 is slow? Ok maybe compared to VS6 but I've always been happy with VS2005's IDE. I've had an Athlon X2 since 2005 though, which runs IntelliSense on the second core...

I'll upgrade to quad-core soon too, so I probably won't notice any 2008 slowness either. :happy:

[bladder]

.oisyn said:

That /MP option already exists in 2005 . DOn't use it if you have hyperthreading, it won't compile that much faster but it will make your PC very unresponsive. Luckily, monday I'll be upgrading from a P4 3.2GHz to a quad core Q6600 (2.4 GHz per core) at work, so I can't wait to try out the multicore compile option

ahh. though, it's not like this crappy pc i use can handle a multi anything anyway

One thing I do wonder about. the 2005 EE version uses the 2003 c++ compiler right? which, if i remember correctly was not 100% c++ standard?? If it wasn't then is the 2008 one fully compliant?

[.oisyn]

bladder said:

the 2005 EE version uses the 2003 c++ compiler right?

Wrong.

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which, if i remember correctly was not 100% c++ standard??

Right.

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If it wasn't then is the 2008 one fully compliant?

Wrong. And it never will be, because of "export", which is one of C++'s big mistakes anyway. The major missing feature in my opinion is still two phase name lookup.

[.oisyn]

Nick said:

VS2005 is slow? Ok maybe compared to VS6 but I've always been happy with VS2005's IDE.

You're kidding, right? 2005 is very slow compared to 2003. For one thing, they have no centralized disk access system, causing tiny (like, 4 bytes) reads/writes all-over the project, resulting in heavy disk seeking. The intellisense eats up a large portion of the CPU, especially in big projects. Have you enabled the "track changes" feature? After a day's worth of editing, the characters are drawn to the screen slower than I type.

There is a performanc patch though: http://blogs.msdn.co...n-visual-c.aspx.
Beware: doesn't work when the Xbox 360 SDK is installed! (if you try anyway you'll have to remove the hotfix, reinstall VS SP1, and then reinstall the XDK)

I killed the intellisense (by renaming one of the DLL files), because I use Visual Assist anyway.

[Nick]

.oisyn said:

You're kidding, right? 2005 is very slow compared to 2003. For one thing, they have no centralized disk access system, causing tiny (like, 4 bytes) reads/writes all-over the project, resulting in heavy disk seeking.

I'm not kidding. I have two Western Digital Raptor disks though, one for Windows and Visual Studio, and one for my projects. So disk access has never really been a problem to me. However, my laptop (core 2 Duo) doesn't really have a problem with it either so I'm not sure this is a real issue.

Maybe you're in for a happy surprise when upgrading your Pentium 4 to a Core 2 Quad... :happy:

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Have you enabled the "track changes" feature? After a day's worth of editing, the characters are drawn to the screen slower than I type.

I've never experienced that either. I'm just guessing but multi-core might make a significant difference here too, keeping things responsive while heavy processing goes on in the background.

I do frequently commit my changes to SVN though, during which I typically close Visual Studio and the track changes is reset...

[.oisyn]

Nick said:

I do frequently commit my changes to SVN though, during which I typically close Visual Studio and the track changes is reset...

Hmm that might explain things, my average run-time of visual studio is about 4 weeks, and I usually have 3 instances running at the same time (and two of them have solutions opened containing about 3000 files each)

[TheNut]

Hmm, I'm going to give this a try. I'll be migrating over from VS.2003 (uhh, got to rebuild all my libraries...). At work we're still using VS 6, which is like caveman style programming ;)

[TheNut]

Whoa, there's no resource editor or support for resource files (specifically dll versioning) with the express edition. The static build of my engine managed to compile fine without it though. It's also strange that 2008 complained about fopen and other related C API calls not being secure. Not exactly sure what that's all about, and I'm not amused with their brother functions ***_s. Bah, trash.

The IDE isn't to bad though. Looks good with the gradient windows. The views have been changed around though, so it took a little getting use to. The multiprocess compiler is a little faster, as is overall development. It also looks like they replaced the processor optimization option with the Enhanced Instruction Set.

It's a nice package and it's also nice to stay uptodate, but VS 2003 + resource editing is still an integral part of my development. Perhaps 2010 ;)

[monjardin]

The resource and secure functions stuff was in 2005 Express too. You can turn off the warnings with a preprocessor switch. There are external resource editors available and the output compiles fine. Of course, you get the resource editor back with the non-Express versions.