{"id":43,"date":"2005-09-12T09:35:28","date_gmt":"2005-09-12T09:35:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blackcompanystudios.co.uk\/blog\/?p=43"},"modified":"2005-09-12T09:36:37","modified_gmt":"2005-09-12T09:36:37","slug":"visual-studioige","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blackcompanystudios.co.uk\/blog\/visual-studioige\/","title":{"rendered":"Visual Studio\/IGE"},"content":{"rendered":"

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<\/a>. 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<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

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<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

I’ll probably download and take a look at the Visual Studio C# package as well – it seems a lot of people are d
\neveloping 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).<\/p>\n

Anyway, now I have VS.NET installed, I can get to playing with IGE<\/a> (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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pg1JR-H","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blackcompanystudios.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blackcompanystudios.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blackcompanystudios.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blackcompanystudios.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blackcompanystudios.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blackcompanystudios.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blackcompanystudios.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blackcompanystudios.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blackcompanystudios.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}