Visual Studio 11 and Windows 8
I'm curious what the community here thinks about developing apps for Windows 8. Specifically developing apps using Windows 8 SDK in Visual Studio 11 which is currently in beta.
I'm super excited about Windows 8 and really looking forward to it. I have apps for Windows Phone 7 that I want to have available at launch of Windows 8. However, the word "beta" in front of Visual Studio 11 (which has the new SDK for Win 8) is somewhat of a cautionary warning for me.
From onofficial sources on the Web, Windows 8 is set to launch this October and there is no word when VS11 will be released. I want to start researching now so in a month when I have summer break, I can start heavy development so they application can be available at launch.
What is your opinion. Should I be cautious of the word "beta" or am I being too paranoid and the core components/SDK will not change much?
The reason I ask is because Gmail was in beta for an eternity even though the application was very, very stable and Google abruptly changed their minds because the word "beta" was a deterrent for investors.
I'm very curious for your thoughts.
I'm super excited about Windows 8 and really looking forward to it. I have apps for Windows Phone 7 that I want to have available at launch of Windows 8. However, the word "beta" in front of Visual Studio 11 (which has the new SDK for Win 8) is somewhat of a cautionary warning for me.
From onofficial sources on the Web, Windows 8 is set to launch this October and there is no word when VS11 will be released. I want to start researching now so in a month when I have summer break, I can start heavy development so they application can be available at launch.
What is your opinion. Should I be cautious of the word "beta" or am I being too paranoid and the core components/SDK will not change much?
The reason I ask is because Gmail was in beta for an eternity even though the application was very, very stable and Google abruptly changed their minds because the word "beta" was a deterrent for investors.
I'm very curious for your thoughts.
closed account (S6k9GNh0)
I wouldn't touch Windows with a 100ft pole. I just hope the library I use that claims Windows support works else I don't care for Windows support.
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You don't need to worry that much.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_release_life_cycle
Even though Wikipedia's description can be read pretty pessimistically, a beta release is really the one where everything is working as it will when the official release version comes out -- sans some bugs that missed the alpha cycle.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_release_life_cycle
Even though Wikipedia's description can be read pretty pessimistically, a beta release is really the one where everything is working as it will when the official release version comes out -- sans some bugs that missed the alpha cycle.
Hope Windows 8 won't inherit terrible performance known from Windows Vista and Windows 7. Their I/O subsystem, process scheduler and filesystem are total crap. Their network stack is not crap, but they took it from BSD. I'm curious what they were smoking writing this, so their system needs a few *minutes* to load on a decent hardware and gets slower with time (it is fast after fresh installation, but after half year of using it slows down terribly). Linux is better in almost every aspect.
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| rapidcoder wrote: |
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| Their network stack is not crap, but they took it from BSD |
It's like I'm really back in 2003!
| rapidcoder wrote: |
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| their system needs a few *minutes* to load on a decent hardware |
Actually Windows 7 boots in about 30 seconds on my current machine, significantly faster than Linux does. And this isn't a fresh install, I installed it some time last September.
closed account (S6k9GNh0)
I can boot a two year old Arch Linux partition in under 20 seconds. Under the same harddrive and hardware, I boot Windows 7 in about 1 minute and it takes around 5 to 10 minutes to shutdown.
I've been biased towards Windows here as well.
I've been biased towards Windows here as well.
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| Rapidcoder wrote: |
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| their system needs a few *minutes* to load on a decent hardware |
Eh, try 1 minute 10 seconds from cold boot to running Skype, Chrome and Code::blocks. And that's running on a Sata II harddrive, a mid range motherboard and chipset, and older Phenom II and an install that's several YEARS old. Mind you, that's with no password required on boot.
A friend just bought a SSD a few months ago, and I watched it reboot, from the moment he hit reboot, to up again and running chrome, in 30 seconds.
*edit then again the install was only a few months ago...
*edit again, he built it in september, and it takes less than 10 seconds to get from the POST to log in, and a negligible amount of time to actually log in and let the start up services run.
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Ubuntu 11.10 booted for me in under 7 seconds, when I was still using it. I had comparable results with other distros as well.
Although I likely will never again use Windows, I am still worried about the direction they chose to take with their new UI. I prefer KDE's approach of keeping the Desktop and Netbook UIs separate rather than choosing the latter.
-Albatross
Although I likely will never again use Windows, I am still worried about the direction they chose to take with their new UI. I prefer KDE's approach of keeping the Desktop and Netbook UIs separate rather than choosing the latter.
-Albatross
Yea, I'm not a fan of metro AT ALL. Having played with windows 8 for a while it very quickly became obvious they are focusing on touchscreen based devices.
^ That. Accessibility for technical applications (Device Manager, Network Settings, etc.) has essentially disappeared, making it difficult for me to get any administrative work done on a computer. Fortunately I installed it under Hyper-V, so I can always go back to the more-navigable Windows 7.
As for VS11, I'm not a big fan of it. There's auto-auto-complete, which gives suggestions as you type. It's a very nice addition, but that's basically it. The UI reminds me of something out of a 1980's sci-fi, or Win98:
http://a7.sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-ash4/463931_3000625460996_1423108446_32372732_1472581495_o.jpg
Note that the above image has a weird themes issue going on in it. There's the option for dark/light themes, and when I tried to switch back to light it got stuck in the middle. The text editor is set to dark and the rest is set to light. Oh well, a Beta is a Beta. Regardless, you can see the point that I'm trying to get across. The UI took a step back in this release. I'm a major proponent for simplistic styling, but this is just hideous.
The debugger in VS11 has a variety of modes (which I haven't bothered to look at in-depth, but there's apparently a GPU debugging mode now) which I guess is a plus, but whenever you hit a breakpoint it takes a few seconds for it to actually begin showing symbol values.
On top of that, any projects built using VS2010 or VS2011 have to be swapped over to use the 2011 libraries. This doesn't mean that the projects have to be converted (like in 2008 to 2010), but that you have to change the runtime library type from 2010 to 2011. If you didn't, you would compile fine but get some weird errors when you tried to run it via the debugger. The move was annoying for me, as I already had to rebuild SFML for 2010 and my own libraries had already been compiled. But I sucked it up and rebuilt them for 2011, which was fairly painless but time-consuming.
When it comes to VS11 as a tool for Windows Metro development, I can't really give an opinion. Since I was working with Windows 8 on a Hyper-V machine, I didn't bother taking the time to test it out. I've been testing VS11 on Windows 7, which means that I can't see all of the new functionality, but I have noticed "Blend for Visual Studio" which appears to be Microsoft's version of Apple's Interface Builder.
Profiling tools seem to have gotten a nice addition, in that they now have support for monitoring rendering pipelines and various other graphics-based resources. It seems that Microsoft has taken a big move to focusing more on utilizing GPU resources instead of being primarily CPU.
As for VS11, I'm not a big fan of it. There's auto-auto-complete, which gives suggestions as you type. It's a very nice addition, but that's basically it. The UI reminds me of something out of a 1980's sci-fi, or Win98:
http://a7.sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-ash4/463931_3000625460996_1423108446_32372732_1472581495_o.jpg
Note that the above image has a weird themes issue going on in it. There's the option for dark/light themes, and when I tried to switch back to light it got stuck in the middle. The text editor is set to dark and the rest is set to light. Oh well, a Beta is a Beta. Regardless, you can see the point that I'm trying to get across. The UI took a step back in this release. I'm a major proponent for simplistic styling, but this is just hideous.
The debugger in VS11 has a variety of modes (which I haven't bothered to look at in-depth, but there's apparently a GPU debugging mode now) which I guess is a plus, but whenever you hit a breakpoint it takes a few seconds for it to actually begin showing symbol values.
On top of that, any projects built using VS2010 or VS2011 have to be swapped over to use the 2011 libraries. This doesn't mean that the projects have to be converted (like in 2008 to 2010), but that you have to change the runtime library type from 2010 to 2011. If you didn't, you would compile fine but get some weird errors when you tried to run it via the debugger. The move was annoying for me, as I already had to rebuild SFML for 2010 and my own libraries had already been compiled. But I sucked it up and rebuilt them for 2011, which was fairly painless but time-consuming.
When it comes to VS11 as a tool for Windows Metro development, I can't really give an opinion. Since I was working with Windows 8 on a Hyper-V machine, I didn't bother taking the time to test it out. I've been testing VS11 on Windows 7, which means that I can't see all of the new functionality, but I have noticed "Blend for Visual Studio" which appears to be Microsoft's version of Apple's Interface Builder.
Profiling tools seem to have gotten a nice addition, in that they now have support for monitoring rendering pipelines and various other graphics-based resources. It seems that Microsoft has taken a big move to focusing more on utilizing GPU resources instead of being primarily CPU.
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A friend just bought a SSD a few months ago, and I watched it reboot, from the moment he hit reboot, to up again and running chrome, in 30 seconds. |
On SSD Ubuntu takes about 7 seconds to boot to the login screen and next 5 seconds to login and launch webbrowser.
Anyway the problem with Windows 7 is not the time it takes to display login screen, or even the Desktop, but the time it takes for the system to start working fluently, without lags. Probably on SSD it is much less noticeable, but when I used Windows 7 on HDD on quite a fast laptop (I mean fast 7200 RPM HDD, Quad Core processor, 6 GB RAM), even after a few minutes after logging to the desktop, there still was some crazy HDD activity and applications lagged from time to time.
closed account (1yR4jE8b)
+1 rapidcoder
When I use Windows, I'm constantly afraid I'm killing the overall lifetime of my hdd just by using it. The amount of disk access Windows does vs Linux is astounding.
When I use Windows, I'm constantly afraid I'm killing the overall lifetime of my hdd just by using it. The amount of disk access Windows does vs Linux is astounding.
Windows always tries to fill up your RAM with various caches of things, so it's probably paging things in and out of memory or something stupid like that.
I've never used anything else than Windows, but I don't really have any problems. I have noticed there's a lot of "background activity" (it's usually Google Desktop indexing your HDD, which apparently speeds up something, while automatically doing some defragmenting), but it doesn't steal resources when you need them. The Scheduler/Task Manager tends to kill/slow background processes when the user requires more resources.
Boot times do ramp up after a while, but nothing as extravagant as I read here. I think I'm slightly above a minute, on a 5400rpm drive after 2.5 years of heavy usage. I'm very lazy/sloppy when it comes to maintenance. I don't go further than "disable auto-startup for Spotify".
Things like "killing the overal lifetime of my hdd just by using it" sounds like nonsense to me. I'm a heavy user and I push my computers to the extreme, but I've never had any hardware failure. My laptop is never "state of the art" when I buy it, it's used for many hours a day and I use it for 3years on average, after which I give it to my parents who then use it lightly for another few years.
On topic: I've missed the entire Mobile bandwagon and I'm not looking forward to a mobile/desktop hybrid OS.
Boot times do ramp up after a while, but nothing as extravagant as I read here. I think I'm slightly above a minute, on a 5400rpm drive after 2.5 years of heavy usage. I'm very lazy/sloppy when it comes to maintenance. I don't go further than "disable auto-startup for Spotify".
Things like "killing the overal lifetime of my hdd just by using it" sounds like nonsense to me. I'm a heavy user and I push my computers to the extreme, but I've never had any hardware failure. My laptop is never "state of the art" when I buy it, it's used for many hours a day and I use it for 3years on average, after which I give it to my parents who then use it lightly for another few years.
On topic: I've missed the entire Mobile bandwagon and I'm not looking forward to a mobile/desktop hybrid OS.
I like smartphone OSes and I think a few ideas from them can be applied to desktop OSes but it shouldn't be taken too far.
I have to agree with Gaminic. I've been using Windows as my primary OS ever since I started using computers and never had any issues. I have used various versions of Linux and Mac OS and have always found Windows to have a more non-cumbersome and straightforward approach. Sure there are features of other OS's I'd like, i.e. the terminal (Cygwin isn't nearly as good), but as a product which can run most of my development/entertainment software, I've never once had an issue.
While I think a lot of us geeky people might approach an OS from a technical prospective, I think its important to consider the primary user base which is Jane/John Doe who use it for leisure and work related tasks and as a whole, majority don't have problems.
While I think a lot of us geeky people might approach an OS from a technical prospective, I think its important to consider the primary user base which is Jane/John Doe who use it for leisure and work related tasks and as a whole, majority don't have problems.
Probably, the single reason why i still use Windows is the DirectX. Even a programmer takes breaks :'D
closed account (1yR4jE8b)
| I have used various versions of Linux and Mac OS and have always found Windows to have a more non-cumbersome and straightforward approach |
i'm curious what features you are referring to. I find the exact opposite.
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