I've been developing on Visual Studio 2003 for now, but had intended to switch over to 2005 or 2008 at some point in time. Simply because they're nicer environments, they have some neat productivity enhancements, and they have free (as in beer) Express versions which enable anyone to dabble. Way to go, Microsoft!
One thing that had put me off was the Intellisense support. Bottom line is that (for C++ at least) it's utterly dreadful. You get a whopping big NCB file (average 10 x the 2003 size) which is too slow to parse, resulting in struct members (in particular) not popping up. I likes me some Intellisense, so this was a deal-breaker.
Today I finally twigged that the way to fix it was to shut off Class View. So I loaded up in 2008 Express, made some small changes (for loop scoping, character set, nothing dramatic), compiled and ran.
Now, before I continue, I should mention that Microsoft have removed support for the single-threaded CRT from 2005 and 2008. All applications are now multi-threaded, whether you like it or not. This could be fixed by using a different compiler, but the ability to use a differrent compiler is also removed from the Express versions.
First thing I noticed was that mouse input was all over the place. It's obviously got something important running on a separate thread now, and is updating behind the scenes. This was the case for both DirectInput and software. Fixing it would probably require rewrites of code that has already been carefully crafted and debugged. Deal breaker.
Second thing I noticed was that shutting down Quake caused a crash in PF_VarString. Further investigation revealed that this was an "exiting from a map" issue, rather than a shut down issue. I didn't spend too much time on this, as I had already had one deal breaker, but the finger of paranoia is pointing to threading issues again.
The same happened in 2005, so it looks as though I won't be releasing a 2005 or 2008 project. Too bad, but having something that works properly is far more important. You can probably work on the code in these environments, but when it comes to compilation you'll need to use an external tool. Or just get your favourite free (as in speech) IDE and use that.
Way to go, Microsoft.
Thursday, July 24, 2008
Fun with Visual Studio 2005/2008
Posted by
mhquake
at
12:29 AM
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