Post by ATC on Oct 17, 2012 15:35:51 GMT -6
Last night I downloaded Visual Studio 2012 Express (complete) Edition and all I can say about it is: Wow! ... 
This is a great IDE... When 2010 came out I wasn't that impressed with it, though it was good. And I just stuck with my copy of 2008 Pro Edition... didn't feel like spending $500+ on 2010... But now I'm taken aback... They've really pulled it off this time!
For one, the C++ IDE actually works correctly... It has always driven me crazy how weak the C++ IDE for Visual Studio was... Some of my major complaints were the total lack of Intellisense because it misbehaved so badly, inability of the IDE to properly outline function/method blocks (it wouldn't collapsed at the closing } brace but fall all the way down to the next line of code), total lack of syntax highlighting for user-defined types, #defines and Win32 types, etc... But 2012 does all of these things! Plus, we now have C++11 support, and the new version of the language is great; I'm loving it!
Next is the new C# IDE has quite a few improvements over the old... and now we have built-in support for C# 5.0 and .NET 4.5. These two are pretty amazing, and I'm awed at how much C# has progressed and evolved as a language. Need I say more?
I actually like 2012 so much that I think I'm just going to use Express 2012 over my Pro 2008 installation... that's really saying something; the fact that I'd rather an Express version over my older (and previously favorite) Pro version. I guess it was time to make this happen anyway, because we need to be using .NET 4.0 or better and the new C# instead of old 3.5 and C# 3.0. I'm just going to continue using Express until (most likely) around Christmas. Right now it's not hurting anything to not have the Pro features, but I'll definitely be upgrading soon!
--ATC--
This is a great IDE... When 2010 came out I wasn't that impressed with it, though it was good. And I just stuck with my copy of 2008 Pro Edition... didn't feel like spending $500+ on 2010... But now I'm taken aback... They've really pulled it off this time!
For one, the C++ IDE actually works correctly... It has always driven me crazy how weak the C++ IDE for Visual Studio was... Some of my major complaints were the total lack of Intellisense because it misbehaved so badly, inability of the IDE to properly outline function/method blocks (it wouldn't collapsed at the closing } brace but fall all the way down to the next line of code), total lack of syntax highlighting for user-defined types, #defines and Win32 types, etc... But 2012 does all of these things! Plus, we now have C++11 support, and the new version of the language is great; I'm loving it!
Next is the new C# IDE has quite a few improvements over the old... and now we have built-in support for C# 5.0 and .NET 4.5. These two are pretty amazing, and I'm awed at how much C# has progressed and evolved as a language. Need I say more?
I actually like 2012 so much that I think I'm just going to use Express 2012 over my Pro 2008 installation... that's really saying something; the fact that I'd rather an Express version over my older (and previously favorite) Pro version. I guess it was time to make this happen anyway, because we need to be using .NET 4.0 or better and the new C# instead of old 3.5 and C# 3.0. I'm just going to continue using Express until (most likely) around Christmas. Right now it's not hurting anything to not have the Pro features, but I'll definitely be upgrading soon!
--ATC--
