11 comments

11

I was reluctant to check out 2015 without any real pressing need, but I'm glad I did.

So far there's already some nice little QoL type improvements. For instance unnecessary using/references are automatically flagged and you can remove all of them from your entire project with a single click. Pretty sleek. Something very cool is what they've done with source control. It's all natively built in and sleek. In VS2013 you were forced to use things like gitextensions for clean source control support. In 2015 it's all inline and for instance you can immediately check out a seamless diff, check out a version history, etc all with a click or two. Very sleek again. And there's some pretty useful little C# language improvements:

int Blah { get; set; } = 3;

Something that everybody's typed at some point and was stupefied when it didn't work is finally valid code! Another cool feature is nameof:

int foo = 123; string s = nameof(foo);

s is, unsurprisingly, now equal to "foo". There's a lot of really interesting possibilities there. At the very minimum a basic debug output that lists the value of parameters can now survive and make sense even through radical refactoring in the code. Again, sleek.

This is from a a couple of hours with the code and probably just scratching the surface. I guess summing it up in one word so far would be... sleek.

2

On the C++ front there has been HUGE improvements. I mean VS 2013 was much better than previous ones but now we have C++11 and a lot of the newer features, too. So that dramatically closes the gap between VC++ and Clang or GCC which is awesome. Also native iOS and Android cross compiling is very cool.

3

I recently switched from windows to Linux and visual studio is probably the biggest thing I miss about windows. Currently I am using clion, and its great don't get me wrong, but it definitely doesn't feel as polished compared to visual studio. In my ideal world visual studio would release on Linux with some of clions great features.

1

Agreed. As a Linux Guy who got pulled into Windows development, I do miss having VS. The debugger alone makes it worth using--way more productive than gdb.

1

Is it free?

2

Free as in speech (open source): no.

Free as in beer: partially (for everything but enterprise development, IIRC)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gratis_versus_libre

1

Are you really free if you're forbidden from not enforcing or even willingly give up some of your liberties?

1

Open source doesn't necessarily mean free, and free doesn't necessarily mean open source. Examples : Unix is open source but it's not free, Visual Studio Community Edition is free but it's not open source.

0

Unable to get it installed on Windows 10 build 10240, just sits for hours on end at "applying visual studio".

1

Check this link it may be helpful.