Well, I’ve finally bit the bullet and started to migrate from my old Visual Studio 6.0 install over to the new beta of Visual Studio.NET Express. I stuck by 6.0 until now because all I really need is a decent compiler, none of the other fancy features that .NET tried to introduce. Of course, I could simply have kept 6.0 and switched over to using GCC as a back-end, but I thought that would just introduce unnecessary complications. Its tempting though, just because I wanted to put Jam/SCons through their paces as well. Anyway, while the VS.NET beta is still free, I’ll stick with that, and maybe migrate back to VS6/GCC later.

Immediate thoughts on the beta? Well, the compiler ‘just works’, and doesn’t have the template handling problems that were troubling me with 6.0, the UI is nice if a little sluggish. Learning new terminology and layouts is always tiresome, but it doesn’t seem that there’s anything majorly different. They’ll really have to work on the usability though – it turned out you can’t make standard Win32 applications out of the box, you have to install the MS Platform SDK seperately (another 60MB download and seperate install); that was awful – 20 minutes just to install/copy files (not including download time), plus lots of niggly little hand editing of files to make it integrate with VS. I suppose that’s part of still being in beta, but they’d better get a more integrated solution for the end user. If I buy an IDE, I expect it to be able to make all the applications I need straight out of the box; I don’t expect to need to work just to get to square one.

I’ll probably download and take a look at the Visual Studio C# package as well – it seems a lot of people are d
eveloping with it, and it never hurts to add an extra language to your skill-set. I’m told its quite effective for tool building, and takes a lot of effort out of the basics of making a Windows application (grind that I’m sure we could all live without).

Anyway, now I have VS.NET installed, I can get to playing with IGE (a nice clean middle-ware library written by PeteM) and churn out a simple game or two. I’ve been suffering a little because few of the things I’ve been doing in the last month have had any tangible results – it’ll be nice to make something that I can see I’ve achieved something.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 12th, 2005 at 9:35 am and is filed under Tales from the grind-stone. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.