Chambers <ben### [at] pacificwebguycom> wrote:
> I used to like it, until I had a chance to see the professional version 
> in action.  For whatever reason, the free version is crippled beyond 
> belief, speed-wise.  It would literally take more than ten times as long 
> to open, load projects, or compile them.

  Strange. I haven't noticed this. I have used both the express version
and the commercial one of VS 2005.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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Mike Raiford <mra### [at] hotmailcom> wrote:
> Anybody played with them. I realize there are relatively few on here who 
> actually like MS products, but I want to hear other peoples opinions of 
> MS's free versions of their dev tools.

  I have used it and it seems ok.

  Perhaps a bit strangely at least the express version is not a
"download, install, use" package. Besides downloading and installing
the express version, you have to separately download and install the
Windows Platform SDK and manually configure VS to use it (there doesn't
seem to be any way to make it automatically detect that you have the SDK
installed and to use it properly). If you do anything that needs DirectX,
you need to download and install the DirectX SDK and manually configure
VS to use it (again, it doesn't seem to detect this automatically). All
this can be a real pain, especially since it doesn't seem to be documented
anywhere. Without precise instructions on how to do this, it can be next
to impossible to figure it out.
  (I have only experience with VS 2005 Express. I don't know if they
have improved this with VS 2008.)

  Once you have succeeded in installing and configuring everything,
it seem to work ok, though.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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Warp wrote:
>   Perhaps a bit strangely at least the express version is not a
> "download, install, use" package. Besides downloading and installing
> the express version, you have to separately download and install the
> Windows Platform SDK and manually configure VS to use it (there doesn't
> seem to be any way to make it automatically detect that you have the SDK
> installed and to use it properly). If you do anything that needs DirectX,
> you need to download and install the DirectX SDK and manually configure
> VS to use it (again, it doesn't seem to detect this automatically). All
> this can be a real pain, especially since it doesn't seem to be documented
> anywhere. Without precise instructions on how to do this, it can be next
> to impossible to figure it out.

I found this a little odd also. And a little frustrating, because my 
experience with dev tools like this is *very* limited (i.e., this and 
XCode), so I wasn't even sure if I was doing the right thing. In light 
of Nicolas' post, this process took me rather longer than one hour, and 
I hadn't even managed to compile anything yet. But, as you say, once 
it's working, seems to be OK.

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Warp wrote:
> VS to use it (again, it doesn't seem to detect this automatically). All
> this can be a real pain, especially since it doesn't seem to be documented
> anywhere. Without precise instructions on how to do this, it can be next
> to impossible to figure it out.

There's a link from the download page to instructions on how to do this. 
  At least, there was when I tried it, but that was over a year ago, so 
things may have changed :/

-- 
...Ben Chambers
www.pacificwebguy.com

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Warp wrote:
> John VanSickle <evi### [at] hotmailcom> wrote:
>> I installed VS C++ 2005, and immediately found that I could not set it 
>> to assume that all strings were ASCII strings
> 
>   Really? There's a setting in the project properties for this.

Maybe; but since I already have two compilers that work fine--and worked 
fine out of the box without having to be set for it--why bother meddling 
with a third?

And anyway, once the source was edited to compile, I went on to find 
that the linker did not recognize some of the API calls, and I didn't 
feel like diagnosing the cause.

Regards,
John

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Nicolas Alvarez wrote:

> Ah, .not. I stay away from that. Even though some things look tempting. 
> But hey, Vista screenshots with Aero are tempting too (that's the whole 
> idea of marketing), and no way in hell I'll downgrade to it.

Yeah, that's the true evil of it though... Once you get a taste, it's 
hard to go back. Wife's computer has the super-fancy version of Vista. 
I'll have to say, I don't think I've ever used the 3D, roll through the 
windows feature they kept showing when they were promoting vista, But 
the translucent windows are kind of neat, sure it's eye candy ... But 
it's nice eye candy. I'm also quite happy to see they added the ability 
to change the color the windows title bars. Which I sort of missed in XP.

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Nicolas Alvarez wrote:
> I once tried it. Couldn't do anything useful with it during a whole 
> hour. I uninstalled it. Of course, despite recommendations made by 
> Microsoft itself to other developers, the uninstaller didn't remove 
> everything that was installed. I was months with lots of filetypes (like 
> .c) still associated to VS express.

Hmm, VC++ express is somewhat limited, You can do useful things with it, 
but you have to be prepared to program to straight Win32, which, to say 
the least is painful. MFC helps in this regards. Though, you can use 
Managed C++, which has the .NET framework available. I admit, I haven't 
really done anything in Managed C++, preferring to use C# for .net 
development.

> I use gvim and a bash shell (yes, in Windows) for all my development 
> needs. Except for POV-Ray, where I use the internal editor, and for 
> Java, where I use Eclipse. MinGW as C compiler.

I used to have a suite of POSIX tools for Windows. Eclipse was a nice 
editor, but I never really got into Java development. (Which may seem 
strange, seeing as I really like C#, now.)

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Warp wrote:
> Chambers <ben### [at] pacificwebguycom> wrote:
>> I used to like it, until I had a chance to see the professional version 
>> in action.  For whatever reason, the free version is crippled beyond 
>> belief, speed-wise.  It would literally take more than ten times as long 
>> to open, load projects, or compile them.
> 
>   Strange. I haven't noticed this. I have used both the express version
> and the commercial one of VS 2005.
> 

I haven't noticed any speed reductions, either. The one thing I do 
really miss, though is the lack of support for Visual Assist, which is 
a plug-in that enhances some of the IDE's built-in features. Mainly 
because it's member list can be filtered by properties, methods, etc... 
and allows searches based on partial words (i.e. I can type Event, and 
I'll see MouseEventArgs, EventArgs, PaintEventArgs, etc...)

lack of source control is another biggie. C++ lacking MFC is also a 
drawback, given a lot of the C++ development we do uses MFC.

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> Yeah, that's the true evil of it though... Once you get a taste, it's 
> hard to go back. Wife's computer has the super-fancy version of Vista. 
> I'll have to say, I don't think I've ever used the 3D, roll through the 
> windows feature they kept showing when they were promoting vista, But 
> the translucent windows are kind of neat, sure it's eye candy ... But 
> it's nice eye candy.

It has been possible to make the whole window transparent, since Windows 
2000. There's just no UI for it, so you need some 3rd party app like 
PowerMenu. Also, there's obviously no blurred transparency. I have found 
this is really useful to avoid getting distracted by whatever is on the 
background.

I wrote my own program that covers the whole desktop and draws an image, 
then draws a second image only in areas covered by transparent windows. 
So I make the second image be the same as the first image, but blurred 
(I couldn't be bothered to make my program blur it automatically).

http://stuff.povaddict.com.ar/blur.png
http://stuff.povaddict.com.ar/blur_wp.png

Also, did you see the eye candy of Compiz? Way more effects than Vista 
(and in fact a Flip3D-like plugin already exists for it). And written in 
plain C (not even C++!), instead of needing .NET for writing new effects...

> I'm also quite happy to see they added the ability 
> to change the color the windows title bars. Which I sort of missed in XP.

I never run Windows on its default skin anyway. uxtheme patch ftw. My 
current look:
http://stuff.povaddict.com.ar/lunaelement5.png (LE5 also available in black)

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> Nicolas Alvarez wrote:
>> I once tried it. Couldn't do anything useful with it during a whole 
>> hour. I uninstalled it. Of course, despite recommendations made by 
>> Microsoft itself to other developers, the uninstaller didn't remove 
>> everything that was installed. I was months with lots of filetypes 
>> (like .c) still associated to VS express.
> 
> Hmm, VC++ express is somewhat limited, You can do useful things with it, 
> but you have to be prepared to program to straight Win32, which, to say 
> the least is painful. MFC helps in this regards.

All I wanted at that point was getting POV-Ray compiled, unmodified! And 
some other app I don't remember now...

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