17 ms·

Looks like MS made a decision to make Windows as attractive to developers as possible.

giancarlostoro 11y ago
I've said this before and I'm sure others have noticed. Microsoft's focus is 'developers developers developers' whether it's for Visual Studio, or Azure Cloud, if you want software built for your platform you should cater to developers. I also said if I were JetBrains I'd worry about Microsoft's new agenda, they're going to have to take on Microsoft's new route. If Visual Studio itself (not Code) becomes cross-platform in the future that would be a huge blow for IntelliJ and other IDE's that JetBrains makes, maybe not at first but eventually. From my own experience Python Tools for Visual Studio and PyCharm are two of the best IDE's I've ever had the pleasure of using for Python, if that level of detail went into other IDE's that would be fantastic. Not to down other work others have done.
- seanp2k2 11y ago
  I agree re: PyCharm being great and comprehensive; atom currently can't hold a candle to all the features. VS isn't an option since I'm on a Mac, and I assume many people who occasionally / more than occasionally develop in Python are in the same boat. If nothing else, it'd be nice to have a second good option for IDEs. As far as it beating PyCharm...we shall see :)
  - giancarlostoro 11y ago
    If I had to be honest I'd use either of them. I think they're both really well designed. I would not be against using Pycharm or Python Tools for Visual Studio since they're both really great pieces of software from my personal experience. However, Visual Studio would have the benefit of not running on top of Java which at times can either be slow or "fast enough." At least without proper tweaking.
- smiler 11y ago
  It wouldn't surprise me if Microsoft buy Jetbrains
  - giancarlostoro 11y ago
    I've thought about this, or maybe Atlassian or GitHub doing so, or even GitLab, they're all companies that cater to developers and if they acquired JetBrains it would be a move that would keep them on top of their competitors on a new platform, especially Atlassian and GitLab since GitHub at least has Atom (though it suffers performance issues among other things).
    - heartbreak 11y ago
      GitLab seems like a significantly smaller company than Atlassian and GitHub.
      - sytse 11y ago
        We indeed have no plans to acquire Jetbrains. I think they are doing awesome and we probably couldn't afford them. But also we would like to have a development environment that runs online while allowing for browser based and client based editors. Currently we're looking at Koding https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/12759 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/12759
        speedkills 11y ago
        This doesn't change the affordability bit, but IDEA is working on a web hosted IDE. They are rolling it out as an online code review tool first, with nice features like goto definition, but eventually going to full run tests or edit code.
        sytse 11y ago
        You mean https://www.jetbrains.com/idea/ https://www.jetbrains.com/idea/ ?
- V-2 11y ago
  Incidentally, JetBrains is starting out with Project Rider (a C# IDE). I've been working professionally with Xamarin for the past month, honestly I'm shocked how half-baked Xamarin Studio is, both in terms of stability and features. (Since we develop for iOS, we use Macs and VS is not an option). Of course now that Microsoft has stepped in all the way, things may turn around, but my feeling is that the best window of opportunity for JetBrains would be to provide compelling Xamarin tooling on non-Windows platforms. That's the weak spot of their mammoth competitor as far as C# goes https://forums.xamarin.com/discussion/62250/vote-for-project-rider-xamarin-project-support https://forums.xamarin.com/discussion/62250/vote-for-project... https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/oauth?state=%2Fissue%2FRIDER-618 https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/oauth?state=%2Fissue%2FRIDER-...
  - jamra 11y ago
    Well of course Vs is an option. You just use View models and cover them with unit tests. Then you sacrifice one of your developers on the altar of Jobs and force him to implement your iOS code.
    - viperscape 11y ago
      Our mac loving c# developers use parallels, perhaps that's an option for you
    - V-2 11y ago
      :) The idea is that everybody works on Android and iOS alike, no specialization on the team. And the UI itself (Xamarin.Forms) takes the bulk of our development time, we're running into so many quirks, and the cross-platform abstraction is very leaky unfortunately. So your recommendation may be good, but I don't think it would pan out in our particular scenario. Especially since the team consists of people with no prior exposure to Xamarin (C#/MVVM devs + me, an Android dev with some half-forgotten familiarity with C#), so we've been learning on the job a lot
  - rebootthesystem 11y ago
    JetBrains need to get better --far better-- at providing support. In fact, I think they need to have full-time, US-based, knowledgeable support. I've been using their tools for years. We own a few full-product-line subscriptions yet every single time we have to ask for support I know it will be a disappointing experience. We don't do it that frequently, maybe two to four times a year. And, when we do, you can be the problem was well researched and we simply ran into a wall. Between the time it takes for them to get back to you and some of the answers that come back, well, it's less than ideal. This is harsh, but sometimes I think "you might as well have asked me to re-install Windows to fix the problem". What ends-up happening is that we will generally google the heck out of the problem, post it on SO and experiment and sometimes figure it out. In other cases you just give up and live with the issues. On the developer side MS has far better support and the community of developers using their tools is much larger, which means you have a higher probability of finding one or more answers to your problem. Still. Love JetBrains tools. I just wish they'd take support seriously.
- devsquid 11y ago
  Yea, I agree that the IntelliJ IDEA and VS (not code) are the two best IDEs out there. The three major factors I would rank the IDEA over VS. 1. Extensibility, its more likely to support X language 2. Crossplatform, it actually runs on my platform 3. Its UI doesn't change drastically every few years. This is such an underrated thing IMO. Neither VS or IDEA are pretty IDEs, they both are actually butt ugly. They don't need to be. But VS goes thru so many visual changes and reorganizations, its the same reason why I don't use Office. I'm not sure many ppl view this as a bad thing however. I often find MS fans loving to brag about how "modern" their software always looks, even if it still looks just as shitty as the old one lol.
  - giancarlostoro 11y ago
    #3 they're not too bad with the darker themes, but to each his own. Eclipse does a bad job at this though, I think they should modernize their UI extensively. Android Studio isn't too ugly and it's based off IntelliJ.
  - alkonaut 11y ago
    I think the key to UX design is that it's very different to make a website or an application that is occasionally used than it is to make an application where most users use it 40h/week. I really welcome that ms keep iterating on the VS UI, and it doesn't matter if it slows me down the first days if it helps me over the coming year.
  - usrusr 11y ago
    #3 must be the most underrated software feature ever. Too bad that it is at odds with the model of making money by selling new software revisions. Maybe the slow move to paid subscriptions will spare us the hassle of re-learning UIs for no good reason when we are old and grey :) (How much would i pay for a carefully maintained subscription of Office 97? Well, not that much, but that is more than i paid for office software since)
    - toyg 11y ago
      It's at odds with employees' own agendas as well -- nobody gets promoted for fixing a few bugs. Rearranging buttons, that is something your manager will notice.
- st3v3r 11y ago
  Visual Studio proper going cross platform would remove probably the biggest reason to run Windows, which would defeat the purpose of all this.
  - greggyb 11y ago
    Microsoft doesn't make its money on Windows licenses. It makes money on Enterprise versions of Office and its various server projects. The value of a developer's machine is pretty much a rounding error to Microsoft. The value of a developer's output (production and DR instances of server products/Azure services) is immense to Microsoft.
    - st3v3r 11y ago
      But if developers are using Windows, that means that they're also going to write software for Windows. A lot of the high quality, 3rd party applications that run on OS X come from the fact that the authors had been running Mac for a long time, had a need for something, and turned it into a product. Had those developers been on Windows instead, they might be there. That's what Microsoft wants.
      - greggyb 11y ago
        Microsoft wants Azure consumption, SQL Server Enterprise licenses, Office 365 Enterprise seats, Dynamics licenses, and ISV and Cloud Services partners. They already have the desktop market and it is pennies compared to the income they make from enterprise clients.
- kuma4 11y ago
  I hope Visual Studio for Java. IntelliJ is sluggish and looks weird for me. I prefer native UI to Java UI.
  - mhd 11y ago
    Last time I installed a trial version of VS, it had these weird all-caps menu bars and some kind of metro-ish, flat UI. Compared to that, Swing looked more native… (What is it with MS changing the UI with every OS/Office release? Worse than even OS X, and barely better than the plethora of Linux look-and-feels. And yes, I did object to flat tool bar buttons back in the day, too.)
  - frik 11y ago
    If you would prefer "native UI", then you would hate Visual Studio as well. Visual Studio 6 (1998) was the last one which used Win32 API for the UI. Visual Studio.net (aka 2002) already had this non-standard UI controls. Even Eclipse is more "native UI" than Visual Studio, as Eclipse UI is rendered by Win32API and uses common controls. VS uses WPF and they switched to an non-native-look skin starting with Visual Studio 2013. Btw. even Office uses non-native UI controls since the very beginning of Office programs around 1990. You can see this if you open Word 6 in Win95 (or later), the controls and even child-window theme looks like Win3.1. Office 97 had a very visible non-standard window theme with the application title in italic font (no other Win95 app looks like that). The menu bar of Office 1997 and later looks non-standard as well. Office 2007 and later draw a custom drawn ribbon area over the Win32 menu. With COM you can integrate a Word/Excel/etc document area in your sample Win32 application and you can watch how the traditional nativ menu bar is overdrawn by a ribbon area if you click inside the document area.
- blub 11y ago
  Microsoft's focus is profit, as it is for every corporation. If someone screams developers, developers it doesn't mean much. I can remember several instances where developers were nicely screwed by policy and strategy changes, products languages and tools got canceled. I find that the best strategy for someone that doesn't want to depend on Microsoft's moods is to not use their tools, or at least stick to the ones that have a long history and won't be messed up by strategy changes - that doesn't include C# or .NET
  - jsmeaton 11y ago
    Why do you not include C# or .NET? Both have been going for quite some time and there's a tonne of code in the world depending on both. What strategy changes do you think could affect them?
  - jongalloway2 11y ago
    C# and .NET have been around for 16 years. C# is on version 6. Both are open sourced under MIT license (including runtime, compiler, etc.). You're welcome to other reasons to avoid C# and .NET, but worrying about their longevity doesn't look like a rational reason.
    - blub 11y ago
      XNA, managed C++, C++/cli, c++/cx, Silverlight, WinForms, WPF, WinRT. C# and .NET will endure in one form or another, but all these transformations waste developers' time and make their skills obsolete. No thanks, I'd rather learn something and use it more than a couple of years without having it change under me for no good reason.
      - mynameisvlad 11y ago
        None of those are C# or .net. You're complaining about frameworks, which really naturally evolve and change over time. It's downright silly to say that because frameworks are changing, the core language will change too.
beerwulf 11y ago
That ship has sailed long ago.

I've said this before and I'm sure others have noticed. Microsoft's focus is 'developers developers developers' whether it's for Visual Studio, or Azure Cloud, if you want software built for your platform you should cater to developers. I also said if I were JetBrains I'd worry about Microsoft's new agenda, they're going to have to take on Microsoft's new route. If Visual Studio itself (not Code) becomes cross-platform in the future that would be a huge blow for IntelliJ and other IDE's that JetBrains makes, maybe not at first but eventually. From my own experience Python Tools for Visual Studio and PyCharm are two of the best IDE's I've ever had the pleasure of using for Python, if that level of detail went into other IDE's that would be fantastic. Not to down other work others have done.

seanp2k2 11y ago
I agree re: PyCharm being great and comprehensive; atom currently can't hold a candle to all the features. VS isn't an option since I'm on a Mac, and I assume many people who occasionally / more than occasionally develop in Python are in the same boat. If nothing else, it'd be nice to have a second good option for IDEs. As far as it beating PyCharm...we shall see :)
- giancarlostoro 11y ago
  If I had to be honest I'd use either of them. I think they're both really well designed. I would not be against using Pycharm or Python Tools for Visual Studio since they're both really great pieces of software from my personal experience. However, Visual Studio would have the benefit of not running on top of Java which at times can either be slow or "fast enough." At least without proper tweaking.
smiler 11y ago
It wouldn't surprise me if Microsoft buy Jetbrains
- giancarlostoro 11y ago
  I've thought about this, or maybe Atlassian or GitHub doing so, or even GitLab, they're all companies that cater to developers and if they acquired JetBrains it would be a move that would keep them on top of their competitors on a new platform, especially Atlassian and GitLab since GitHub at least has Atom (though it suffers performance issues among other things).
  - heartbreak 11y ago
    GitLab seems like a significantly smaller company than Atlassian and GitHub.
    - sytse 11y ago
      We indeed have no plans to acquire Jetbrains. I think they are doing awesome and we probably couldn't afford them. But also we would like to have a development environment that runs online while allowing for browser based and client based editors. Currently we're looking at Koding https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/12759 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/12759
      - speedkills 11y ago
        This doesn't change the affordability bit, but IDEA is working on a web hosted IDE. They are rolling it out as an online code review tool first, with nice features like goto definition, but eventually going to full run tests or edit code.
        sytse 11y ago
        You mean https://www.jetbrains.com/idea/ https://www.jetbrains.com/idea/ ?
V-2 11y ago
Incidentally, JetBrains is starting out with Project Rider (a C# IDE). I've been working professionally with Xamarin for the past month, honestly I'm shocked how half-baked Xamarin Studio is, both in terms of stability and features. (Since we develop for iOS, we use Macs and VS is not an option). Of course now that Microsoft has stepped in all the way, things may turn around, but my feeling is that the best window of opportunity for JetBrains would be to provide compelling Xamarin tooling on non-Windows platforms. That's the weak spot of their mammoth competitor as far as C# goes https://forums.xamarin.com/discussion/62250/vote-for-project-rider-xamarin-project-support https://forums.xamarin.com/discussion/62250/vote-for-project... https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/oauth?state=%2Fissue%2FRIDER-618 https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/oauth?state=%2Fissue%2FRIDER-...
- jamra 11y ago
  Well of course Vs is an option. You just use View models and cover them with unit tests. Then you sacrifice one of your developers on the altar of Jobs and force him to implement your iOS code.
  - viperscape 11y ago
    Our mac loving c# developers use parallels, perhaps that's an option for you
  - V-2 11y ago
    :) The idea is that everybody works on Android and iOS alike, no specialization on the team. And the UI itself (Xamarin.Forms) takes the bulk of our development time, we're running into so many quirks, and the cross-platform abstraction is very leaky unfortunately. So your recommendation may be good, but I don't think it would pan out in our particular scenario. Especially since the team consists of people with no prior exposure to Xamarin (C#/MVVM devs + me, an Android dev with some half-forgotten familiarity with C#), so we've been learning on the job a lot
- rebootthesystem 11y ago
  JetBrains need to get better --far better-- at providing support. In fact, I think they need to have full-time, US-based, knowledgeable support. I've been using their tools for years. We own a few full-product-line subscriptions yet every single time we have to ask for support I know it will be a disappointing experience. We don't do it that frequently, maybe two to four times a year. And, when we do, you can be the problem was well researched and we simply ran into a wall. Between the time it takes for them to get back to you and some of the answers that come back, well, it's less than ideal. This is harsh, but sometimes I think "you might as well have asked me to re-install Windows to fix the problem". What ends-up happening is that we will generally google the heck out of the problem, post it on SO and experiment and sometimes figure it out. In other cases you just give up and live with the issues. On the developer side MS has far better support and the community of developers using their tools is much larger, which means you have a higher probability of finding one or more answers to your problem. Still. Love JetBrains tools. I just wish they'd take support seriously.
devsquid 11y ago
Yea, I agree that the IntelliJ IDEA and VS (not code) are the two best IDEs out there. The three major factors I would rank the IDEA over VS. 1. Extensibility, its more likely to support X language 2. Crossplatform, it actually runs on my platform 3. Its UI doesn't change drastically every few years. This is such an underrated thing IMO. Neither VS or IDEA are pretty IDEs, they both are actually butt ugly. They don't need to be. But VS goes thru so many visual changes and reorganizations, its the same reason why I don't use Office. I'm not sure many ppl view this as a bad thing however. I often find MS fans loving to brag about how "modern" their software always looks, even if it still looks just as shitty as the old one lol.
- giancarlostoro 11y ago
  #3 they're not too bad with the darker themes, but to each his own. Eclipse does a bad job at this though, I think they should modernize their UI extensively. Android Studio isn't too ugly and it's based off IntelliJ.
- alkonaut 11y ago
  I think the key to UX design is that it's very different to make a website or an application that is occasionally used than it is to make an application where most users use it 40h/week. I really welcome that ms keep iterating on the VS UI, and it doesn't matter if it slows me down the first days if it helps me over the coming year.
- usrusr 11y ago
  #3 must be the most underrated software feature ever. Too bad that it is at odds with the model of making money by selling new software revisions. Maybe the slow move to paid subscriptions will spare us the hassle of re-learning UIs for no good reason when we are old and grey :) (How much would i pay for a carefully maintained subscription of Office 97? Well, not that much, but that is more than i paid for office software since)
  - toyg 11y ago
    It's at odds with employees' own agendas as well -- nobody gets promoted for fixing a few bugs. Rearranging buttons, that is something your manager will notice.
st3v3r 11y ago
Visual Studio proper going cross platform would remove probably the biggest reason to run Windows, which would defeat the purpose of all this.
- greggyb 11y ago
  Microsoft doesn't make its money on Windows licenses. It makes money on Enterprise versions of Office and its various server projects. The value of a developer's machine is pretty much a rounding error to Microsoft. The value of a developer's output (production and DR instances of server products/Azure services) is immense to Microsoft.
  - st3v3r 11y ago
    But if developers are using Windows, that means that they're also going to write software for Windows. A lot of the high quality, 3rd party applications that run on OS X come from the fact that the authors had been running Mac for a long time, had a need for something, and turned it into a product. Had those developers been on Windows instead, they might be there. That's what Microsoft wants.
    - greggyb 11y ago
      Microsoft wants Azure consumption, SQL Server Enterprise licenses, Office 365 Enterprise seats, Dynamics licenses, and ISV and Cloud Services partners. They already have the desktop market and it is pennies compared to the income they make from enterprise clients.
kuma4 11y ago
I hope Visual Studio for Java. IntelliJ is sluggish and looks weird for me. I prefer native UI to Java UI.
- mhd 11y ago
  Last time I installed a trial version of VS, it had these weird all-caps menu bars and some kind of metro-ish, flat UI. Compared to that, Swing looked more native… (What is it with MS changing the UI with every OS/Office release? Worse than even OS X, and barely better than the plethora of Linux look-and-feels. And yes, I did object to flat tool bar buttons back in the day, too.)
- frik 11y ago
  If you would prefer "native UI", then you would hate Visual Studio as well. Visual Studio 6 (1998) was the last one which used Win32 API for the UI. Visual Studio.net (aka 2002) already had this non-standard UI controls. Even Eclipse is more "native UI" than Visual Studio, as Eclipse UI is rendered by Win32API and uses common controls. VS uses WPF and they switched to an non-native-look skin starting with Visual Studio 2013. Btw. even Office uses non-native UI controls since the very beginning of Office programs around 1990. You can see this if you open Word 6 in Win95 (or later), the controls and even child-window theme looks like Win3.1. Office 97 had a very visible non-standard window theme with the application title in italic font (no other Win95 app looks like that). The menu bar of Office 1997 and later looks non-standard as well. Office 2007 and later draw a custom drawn ribbon area over the Win32 menu. With COM you can integrate a Word/Excel/etc document area in your sample Win32 application and you can watch how the traditional nativ menu bar is overdrawn by a ribbon area if you click inside the document area.
blub 11y ago
Microsoft's focus is profit, as it is for every corporation. If someone screams developers, developers it doesn't mean much. I can remember several instances where developers were nicely screwed by policy and strategy changes, products languages and tools got canceled. I find that the best strategy for someone that doesn't want to depend on Microsoft's moods is to not use their tools, or at least stick to the ones that have a long history and won't be messed up by strategy changes - that doesn't include C# or .NET
- jsmeaton 11y ago
  Why do you not include C# or .NET? Both have been going for quite some time and there's a tonne of code in the world depending on both. What strategy changes do you think could affect them?
- jongalloway2 11y ago
  C# and .NET have been around for 16 years. C# is on version 6. Both are open sourced under MIT license (including runtime, compiler, etc.). You're welcome to other reasons to avoid C# and .NET, but worrying about their longevity doesn't look like a rational reason.
  - blub 11y ago
    XNA, managed C++, C++/cli, c++/cx, Silverlight, WinForms, WPF, WinRT. C# and .NET will endure in one form or another, but all these transformations waste developers' time and make their skills obsolete. No thanks, I'd rather learn something and use it more than a couple of years without having it change under me for no good reason.
    - mynameisvlad 11y ago
      None of those are C# or .net. You're complaining about frameworks, which really naturally evolve and change over time. It's downright silly to say that because frameworks are changing, the core language will change too.

beerwulf 11y ago

That ship has sailed long ago.