5 ms·

"VC++6 is remarkably powerful for 1996. It has features such as "Go to definition", breakpoints, stacktrace, and variable inspections (but no Intellisense auto-

"VC++6 is remarkably powerful for 1996. It has features such as "Go to definition", breakpoints, stacktrace, and variable inspections (but no Intellisense auto-completion yet). I never used it but it must have felt like a dream at the time." And here we are, in a generation of people writing blogs that never used VS6. I am now officially old. I was still using VS6 as late as 2009 btw...also it's from 1998. If you made a list of Microsoft bangers it's in the top 5 with probably windbg, quickbasic and windows 3.11.

vee-kay 4mo ago
Before the .Net era, there were millions of programmers who were experts in VB. In fact, VB6 was the defacto tool to build desktop apps. Then Microsoft decided to compete with the new-age rivals: Java and CORBA. So it expanded COM into DCOM and then further into COM+, and eventually released the .Net platform. Suddenly, those millions of programmers and their built desktop apps were obsolete, as they had to race to understand .Net and learn how to use it to build new apps and replacements for the old VB6 apps. And somewhere along the way, many of them decided it wasn't worth the struggle (because .Net was a nightmare to install as client apps on Windows machines; even the deployment scripts had becom3 too complex), and they migrated to other tools (Java, Python, Perl, Ruby on Rails, PHP, etc.) or to non-programming jobs (usually management). Thus, within a few years, Microsoft had veritably killed the programming industry it took decades to build and nurture (and yes, Microsoft's decision to turn a blind eye - as its Windows OSes, MS Office and Visual Studio (VB & VC++) tools were pirated across the world, churning out millions of programmers and users familiar with its products as they used the pirated versions at school, college. home and office - that was also a deliberate decision by Microsoft during this halycon era). But I feel .Net became too big of a beast even for mighty Microsoft to handle. As concerns grew over the performance aspects and innumerable dependencies of the .Net platform and related tools (Azure, SSIS, SSRS, etc.), the world started to shift away from Microsoft's tools, and that's perhaps why Microsoft finally knuckled under and embraced the open-source ecosystem it had openly hated for decades. VSCode, etc., are Microsoft's last-ditch attempts to have some relevancy in the programming industry.
- kristopolous 4mo ago
  .net was fine ... they were solving these fleeting problems of interoperability, event driven gui programming, object re-use and a bunch of other things. They tried tackling this so many ways: win16, ole, mfc, activex, win32s ... it was a big mess and nothing really worked well. Microsoft had some really smart people working on the problem for years and .net was the culmination of the efforts with things like c# and the very interesting f#. The problem was they finally solved the desktop interoperability problem when it no longer mattered and there wasn't a huge killer app for it. Properly scoped well designed abstractions can be extremely powerful and also pretty useless. There's an interesting counterfactual if they had .net ready to go around windows 98 ... I might be on a windows phone right now...
gryson 4mo ago
You make it sound like he's some young'un, but Fabien has been programming since 1983. https://fabiensanglard.net/40/ https://fabiensanglard.net/40/
- Sarkie 4mo ago
  Exactly but writing to serve his audience
DanielHB 4mo ago
Turbo Pascal had breakpoints, variable inspections in the late 80s. I think it had stack traces too but not 100% sure. I am not old enough to have used it professionally, but my teacher used it for teaching intro programming in the early 2000s. So I used it quite a lot, the debugger was great and the development loop was so tight. Not until I got into web dev did it ever feel "fast" to make change->see change. To this day it is still bad in most stacks.
- haspok 4mo ago
  Yes, but if you compare the complexity of (Turbo) Pascal to the complexity of C++... language, environment, libraries and cross-compilation... (A nice thought-experiment is to ask if Quake could have been coded in TP at all - even if memory hadn't been an issue (I think there was no DOS extender for TP, but I could be wrong).)
  - bluedino 4mo ago
    I don't see why it couldn't have been written in Pascal. Plus, Quake was written in C/asm, not C++.
  - invader 4mo ago
    In the storm of Doom-Quake mania of the mid 90s there was Chasm: The Rift by a small Ukrainian company Action Forms. And if memory serves me right, it was created in Turbo Pascal. It was late in development and came out in 1997 after Quake, so it didn't get much traction. But the engine, though pretty limited, could produce 3D enemies with interesting effects not found even in Quake. So Turbo Pascal (with a whole bunch of x86 asm inclusions) was totally capable of producing Quake-level games. I myself, in the late 90s, discovered the hidden capacities when I learned x86 assembly from Peter Abel's book. Once I got rid of the primitive TP BGI library and switched to VGA 13h, it was an unbelievable level up in abilities to manipulate pixels on the screen!
    - Narishma 4mo ago
      > Chasm: The Rift I might be misremembering but I thought it was more of a Doom-style engine with 3d models instead of sprites for the entities, rather than a full 3d engine like Quake.
EliRivers 4mo ago
Ah yes, VC++6.0 It had such a long lifetime. The last time I used it in anger to release commercial software was round about the year 2020, at which point the dev environment for that particular piece of software that customers were still paying annual license fees on was a VM machine. The source code repo it linked to had been unknowingly destroyed years earlier, so the VM image was copied around as needed. One had to find the very latest version of that image, because otherwise any changes one made would of course exclude some other recent changes and customers would receive a Frankenversion. Starting the VM would reveal a desktop with VC++6 already open, and enough supporting evidence to show how to build the software. Make your changes, build, carefully extract the binary to send to the users, freeze the VM again. I expect it's still there, still being brought back every year for "one last update."
haspok 4mo ago
I used VS6 professionally and for private business around 2000-2004, and it was still going strong then. VC++ was great. One thing though that I still have nightmares about is Visual SourceSafe, Microsoft's idea of a source control system for small teams. It was not only terrible to use (and slow), but we regularly lost data in it due to concurrency issues.
- kristopolous 4mo ago
  TortoiseCVS all the way down. Nothing else came close. (this was before git and svn, kids. relax!)
- Traubenfuchs 4mo ago
  It was my favorite VCS ever at my first workplace where we deployed .war to prod tomcat from eclipse with one click. No tests, no PRs, no tickets. Customer would call me and I could get a change out to them within 5 minutes. Most (and only!) agile workplace I ever experienced in two decades.
- nnevatie 4mo ago
  > Visual SourceSafe Ugh, instant flashbacks and not the good kind.
  - avadodin 4mo ago
    I transitioned my employer directly from VSS to git back in the day as soon as I had to start managing sources. It was pretty bad using vss for a little while but luckily there was a vss2git tool already so it was seamless. Our customers have just recently finally deprecated SVN lol.
    - nnevatie 4mo ago
      And here I thought I'm dealing with legacy setups!
- jaymzcampbell 4mo ago
  Speaking of MS and source control, I have to shout out this incredibly niche channel [1] that recently covered "Microsoft Delta", a precursor and home grown effort that was eventually abandoned in favour of buying in what would become SourceSafe. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bNLp_oTuNM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bNLp_oTuNM
pragma_x 4mo ago
100% agree. Not only was VC++6 a stand-out product overall, but it was easily the better IDE out of the crop of options at the time. Sadly, the product line got worse before VSCode came out. Things are much better now.
- pooloo 4mo ago
  The load times of VC6 versus VSCode... yeah. I would bet you can load a VC6 project faster in OP's environment faster than VSCode could load the same project in a current environment.
jchw 4mo ago
VC++6 was the first IDE I ever used: as a kid, I was gifted a CD that had a version of it included. What a great tool to have for the time. I would go on to use Bloodshed Dev-C++ next. Which was also quite great for the time.
skew-aberration 4mo ago
Rational Apex Ada is another dev platform that was way ahead of its time in early to late 90's. Multi-user hosted dev environment with incremental compilation and dependency tracking, syntax and semantic error highlighting, semantic search (i.e function signature) across whole repo, its own version control system with a git submodules style structure, automatic formatting as you write code. [Remote] Debugging and emulation features (stack trace, line of code, disassembly, etc), plus excellent VxWorks integration and tooling. Not to mention all the Ada language features which are still not available in modern languages.
eurekin 4mo ago
It feels now like an alternative timeline, one which performance optimisations were first and foremost still. Sometimes I fantasize, thinking how would our current development ecosystem look like, if we never abandoned the "be very vigilant with all resources you use" approach, that includes the whole webdev liftoff, where we ship a few hundred mb chromium engine for a dock app
- bityard 4mo ago
  In the timeline I remember, Microsoft and Windows were routinely criticized for producing bloated and buggy systems. Especially from those who previously used an Amiga or Mac. A new version of Windows inevitably meant buying a whole new computer, along with upgrading the memory midway through it's 3-4 year lifespan.
  - tosti 4mo ago
    A friend of mine installed MS-Windows 95 on a 386 and Weird Al Yankovic nailed it: But my machine, it's obsolete. It takes an hour just to bring up the screen!
    - fragmede 4mo ago
      https://youtu.be/Obt4rI7Dhbo https://youtu.be/Obt4rI7Dhbo That's a throwback.
    - Sophira 4mo ago
      Weird Al didn't make that song! That was Bob Rivers.
- miki123211 4mo ago
  We'd have far fewer apps, far fewer features, far more bugs, far more crashes, far less stability and far more memory safety vulnerabilities. Oh, and Linux and Mac would be far less usable. The age of performance optimizations was the age of computers as little islands that didn't need to communicate with anybody or anything, and definitely not outside of a homogeneous LAN environment. It was the age of people having just one device, running one OS, with no expectation of data synchronization. Sharing files was, at best, done by sending quarterly_report_v14_approved_by_legal_fixed.doc over email. This is no longer the age we live in.
Uvix 4mo ago
Could be worse. It’s finally gone now but I believe that my employer used VS6 as late as 2025.
pjmlp 4mo ago
Many of those features were already available in MS-DOS and Windows 3.x IDEs from Borland for Turbo Pascal and C++. Which is why when I got into UNIX development felt like going into the stone age of development tools, thankfully XEmacs was already there. Which by the way, it was born for Energize C++, in 1993! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQQTScuApWk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQQTScuApWk Also here is what NeXTSTEP development environment looked like, used for Quake tooling development, in a 1991 marketing video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGhfB-NICzg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGhfB-NICzg Which is why, I usually assert I cannot understand the nostalgia of CLI and TUI, being there at the time, and not being able to use some of these systems, due to the amount of money they required.
- joe_mamba 4mo ago
  >Which is why, I usually assert I cannot understand the nostalgia of CLI and TUI Elitism
  - pjmlp 4mo ago
    Yeah, right. :) https://www.reddit.com/r/cinescenes/comments/18h22ug/hackers_1995_1337_books https://www.reddit.com/r/cinescenes/comments/18h22ug/hackers...
  - i_am_a_peasant 4mo ago
    sometimes you wanna do debugging on a device that has no screen or ethernet port too
    - pjmlp 4mo ago
      Debugging can be done even by serial ports and JTAG.
- skydhash 4mo ago
  > Which is why, I usually assert I cannot understand the nostalgia of CLI and TUI, being there at the time, and not being able to use some of these systems, due to the amount of money they required. I was not there at the time, but one appeal of CLI (not TUI) is scripting. After a while, you have all your routine packaged in nice alias and commands. And that’s universal across all languages and projects.
zelphirkalt 4mo ago
Didn't Smalltalk environments have those features ages ago already?
- pjmlp 4mo ago
  It did, as did other Xerox systems, Interlisp-D, XDE and Cedar.
wk_end 4mo ago
I could've sworn VC++6 had Intellisense. I'm not going to dig too far to confirm but Wikipedia seems to agree with me (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_completion#Visual_Studio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_completion#Visual_Studio) - it's not a great reference but definitely implies that it was there: > the Visual Basic versions of IntelliSense were always more robust and complete than the 5.0 and 6.0 (97 and 98 in the Visual Studio naming sequence) versions of Visual C++
- tom_ 4mo ago
  I'm also pretty certain it did, and actually that VC++5 (that I'd used as a student) didn't. I'm less confident about go to definition and stuff, but I think that was all part and parcel of the same thing, so VC++6 had it and VC++5 didn't. (Just like today, it would sometimes fail to work, for no obvious reason, and it was impossible to figure out why, so perhaps for this article it had got itself into one of those situations...)
tosti 4mo ago
The problem wasn't the IDE, but win32 API documentation was very poorly written back then and lots of programs suffered because of it.
- NuclearPM 4mo ago
  That’s what this was for: https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/programming-windows-95-microsoft-programming-series_charles-petzold/501230/item/1863103/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=pmax_canada_high_17770447165&utm_adgroup=&utm_term=&utm_content=&gad_source=1&gad_campaignid=17425663805&gbraid=0AAAAADwY45g5EXATjM4ywoYi9Q__lrIOV&gclid=EAIaIQobChMI1-mHjYXflAMVfSrUAR2BtSbaEAQYBiABEgKUbvD_BwE#idiq=1863103&edition=2302929 https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/programming-windows-95-microso...
p0w3n3d 4mo ago
Still young people who have perseverance to load up old windows and VC deserve kudos
qingcharles 4mo ago
I thought we used VC++ 6 to write Abomination[1] but I guess it was VC++ 4 as the dates don't align. The serial cable debugger feature was a godsend. Had the game running on one PC and stepping through it on the other. VSS would kill us, though. Crazy that I'm still using the same IDE in 2026. [1] https://youtu.be/ESGevBO4KKA?t=682 https://youtu.be/ESGevBO4KKA?t=682

vee-kay 4mo ago

Before the .Net era, there were millions of programmers who were experts in VB. In fact, VB6 was the defacto tool to build desktop apps. Then Microsoft decided to compete with the new-age rivals: Java and CORBA. So it expanded COM into DCOM and then further into COM+, and eventually released the .Net platform. Suddenly, those millions of programmers and their built desktop apps were obsolete, as they had to race to understand .Net and learn how to use it to build new apps and replacements for the old VB6 apps. And somewhere along the way, many of them decided it wasn't worth the struggle (because .Net was a nightmare to install as client apps on Windows machines; even the deployment scripts had becom3 too complex), and they migrated to other tools (Java, Python, Perl, Ruby on Rails, PHP, etc.) or to non-programming jobs (usually management). Thus, within a few years, Microsoft had veritably killed the programming industry it took decades to build and nurture (and yes, Microsoft's decision to turn a blind eye - as its Windows OSes, MS Office and Visual Studio (VB & VC++) tools were pirated across the world, churning out millions of programmers and users familiar with its products as they used the pirated versions at school, college. home and office - that was also a deliberate decision by Microsoft during this halycon era). But I feel .Net became too big of a beast even for mighty Microsoft to handle. As concerns grew over the performance aspects and innumerable dependencies of the .Net platform and related tools (Azure, SSIS, SSRS, etc.), the world started to shift away from Microsoft's tools, and that's perhaps why Microsoft finally knuckled under and embraced the open-source ecosystem it had openly hated for decades. VSCode, etc., are Microsoft's last-ditch attempts to have some relevancy in the programming industry.

kristopolous 4mo ago
.net was fine ... they were solving these fleeting problems of interoperability, event driven gui programming, object re-use and a bunch of other things. They tried tackling this so many ways: win16, ole, mfc, activex, win32s ... it was a big mess and nothing really worked well. Microsoft had some really smart people working on the problem for years and .net was the culmination of the efforts with things like c# and the very interesting f#. The problem was they finally solved the desktop interoperability problem when it no longer mattered and there wasn't a huge killer app for it. Properly scoped well designed abstractions can be extremely powerful and also pretty useless. There's an interesting counterfactual if they had .net ready to go around windows 98 ... I might be on a windows phone right now...

gryson 4mo ago

You make it sound like he's some young'un, but Fabien has been programming since 1983. https://fabiensanglard.net/40/ https://fabiensanglard.net/40/

Sarkie 4mo ago
Exactly but writing to serve his audience

DanielHB 4mo ago

Turbo Pascal had breakpoints, variable inspections in the late 80s. I think it had stack traces too but not 100% sure. I am not old enough to have used it professionally, but my teacher used it for teaching intro programming in the early 2000s. So I used it quite a lot, the debugger was great and the development loop was so tight. Not until I got into web dev did it ever feel "fast" to make change->see change. To this day it is still bad in most stacks.

haspok 4mo ago
Yes, but if you compare the complexity of (Turbo) Pascal to the complexity of C++... language, environment, libraries and cross-compilation... (A nice thought-experiment is to ask if Quake could have been coded in TP at all - even if memory hadn't been an issue (I think there was no DOS extender for TP, but I could be wrong).)
- bluedino 4mo ago
  I don't see why it couldn't have been written in Pascal. Plus, Quake was written in C/asm, not C++.
- invader 4mo ago
  In the storm of Doom-Quake mania of the mid 90s there was Chasm: The Rift by a small Ukrainian company Action Forms. And if memory serves me right, it was created in Turbo Pascal. It was late in development and came out in 1997 after Quake, so it didn't get much traction. But the engine, though pretty limited, could produce 3D enemies with interesting effects not found even in Quake. So Turbo Pascal (with a whole bunch of x86 asm inclusions) was totally capable of producing Quake-level games. I myself, in the late 90s, discovered the hidden capacities when I learned x86 assembly from Peter Abel's book. Once I got rid of the primitive TP BGI library and switched to VGA 13h, it was an unbelievable level up in abilities to manipulate pixels on the screen!
  - Narishma 4mo ago
    > Chasm: The Rift I might be misremembering but I thought it was more of a Doom-style engine with 3d models instead of sprites for the entities, rather than a full 3d engine like Quake.

EliRivers 4mo ago

Ah yes, VC++6.0 It had such a long lifetime. The last time I used it in anger to release commercial software was round about the year 2020, at which point the dev environment for that particular piece of software that customers were still paying annual license fees on was a VM machine. The source code repo it linked to had been unknowingly destroyed years earlier, so the VM image was copied around as needed. One had to find the very latest version of that image, because otherwise any changes one made would of course exclude some other recent changes and customers would receive a Frankenversion. Starting the VM would reveal a desktop with VC++6 already open, and enough supporting evidence to show how to build the software. Make your changes, build, carefully extract the binary to send to the users, freeze the VM again. I expect it's still there, still being brought back every year for "one last update."

haspok 4mo ago

I used VS6 professionally and for private business around 2000-2004, and it was still going strong then. VC++ was great. One thing though that I still have nightmares about is Visual SourceSafe, Microsoft's idea of a source control system for small teams. It was not only terrible to use (and slow), but we regularly lost data in it due to concurrency issues.

kristopolous 4mo ago
TortoiseCVS all the way down. Nothing else came close. (this was before git and svn, kids. relax!)
Traubenfuchs 4mo ago
It was my favorite VCS ever at my first workplace where we deployed .war to prod tomcat from eclipse with one click. No tests, no PRs, no tickets. Customer would call me and I could get a change out to them within 5 minutes. Most (and only!) agile workplace I ever experienced in two decades.
nnevatie 4mo ago
> Visual SourceSafe Ugh, instant flashbacks and not the good kind.
- avadodin 4mo ago
  I transitioned my employer directly from VSS to git back in the day as soon as I had to start managing sources. It was pretty bad using vss for a little while but luckily there was a vss2git tool already so it was seamless. Our customers have just recently finally deprecated SVN lol.
  - nnevatie 4mo ago
    And here I thought I'm dealing with legacy setups!
jaymzcampbell 4mo ago
Speaking of MS and source control, I have to shout out this incredibly niche channel [1] that recently covered "Microsoft Delta", a precursor and home grown effort that was eventually abandoned in favour of buying in what would become SourceSafe. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bNLp_oTuNM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bNLp_oTuNM

pragma_x 4mo ago

100% agree. Not only was VC++6 a stand-out product overall, but it was easily the better IDE out of the crop of options at the time. Sadly, the product line got worse before VSCode came out. Things are much better now.

pooloo 4mo ago
The load times of VC6 versus VSCode... yeah. I would bet you can load a VC6 project faster in OP's environment faster than VSCode could load the same project in a current environment.

jchw 4mo ago

VC++6 was the first IDE I ever used: as a kid, I was gifted a CD that had a version of it included. What a great tool to have for the time. I would go on to use Bloodshed Dev-C++ next. Which was also quite great for the time.

skew-aberration 4mo ago

Rational Apex Ada is another dev platform that was way ahead of its time in early to late 90's. Multi-user hosted dev environment with incremental compilation and dependency tracking, syntax and semantic error highlighting, semantic search (i.e function signature) across whole repo, its own version control system with a git submodules style structure, automatic formatting as you write code. [Remote] Debugging and emulation features (stack trace, line of code, disassembly, etc), plus excellent VxWorks integration and tooling. Not to mention all the Ada language features which are still not available in modern languages.

eurekin 4mo ago

It feels now like an alternative timeline, one which performance optimisations were first and foremost still. Sometimes I fantasize, thinking how would our current development ecosystem look like, if we never abandoned the "be very vigilant with all resources you use" approach, that includes the whole webdev liftoff, where we ship a few hundred mb chromium engine for a dock app

bityard 4mo ago
In the timeline I remember, Microsoft and Windows were routinely criticized for producing bloated and buggy systems. Especially from those who previously used an Amiga or Mac. A new version of Windows inevitably meant buying a whole new computer, along with upgrading the memory midway through it's 3-4 year lifespan.
- tosti 4mo ago
  A friend of mine installed MS-Windows 95 on a 386 and Weird Al Yankovic nailed it: But my machine, it's obsolete. It takes an hour just to bring up the screen!
  - fragmede 4mo ago
    https://youtu.be/Obt4rI7Dhbo https://youtu.be/Obt4rI7Dhbo That's a throwback.
  - Sophira 4mo ago
    Weird Al didn't make that song! That was Bob Rivers.
miki123211 4mo ago
We'd have far fewer apps, far fewer features, far more bugs, far more crashes, far less stability and far more memory safety vulnerabilities. Oh, and Linux and Mac would be far less usable. The age of performance optimizations was the age of computers as little islands that didn't need to communicate with anybody or anything, and definitely not outside of a homogeneous LAN environment. It was the age of people having just one device, running one OS, with no expectation of data synchronization. Sharing files was, at best, done by sending quarterly_report_v14_approved_by_legal_fixed.doc over email. This is no longer the age we live in.

Uvix 4mo ago

Could be worse. It’s finally gone now but I believe that my employer used VS6 as late as 2025.

pjmlp 4mo ago

Many of those features were already available in MS-DOS and Windows 3.x IDEs from Borland for Turbo Pascal and C++. Which is why when I got into UNIX development felt like going into the stone age of development tools, thankfully XEmacs was already there. Which by the way, it was born for Energize C++, in 1993! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQQTScuApWk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQQTScuApWk Also here is what NeXTSTEP development environment looked like, used for Quake tooling development, in a 1991 marketing video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGhfB-NICzg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGhfB-NICzg Which is why, I usually assert I cannot understand the nostalgia of CLI and TUI, being there at the time, and not being able to use some of these systems, due to the amount of money they required.

joe_mamba 4mo ago
>Which is why, I usually assert I cannot understand the nostalgia of CLI and TUI Elitism
- pjmlp 4mo ago
  Yeah, right. :) https://www.reddit.com/r/cinescenes/comments/18h22ug/hackers_1995_1337_books https://www.reddit.com/r/cinescenes/comments/18h22ug/hackers...
- i_am_a_peasant 4mo ago
  sometimes you wanna do debugging on a device that has no screen or ethernet port too
  - pjmlp 4mo ago
    Debugging can be done even by serial ports and JTAG.
skydhash 4mo ago
> Which is why, I usually assert I cannot understand the nostalgia of CLI and TUI, being there at the time, and not being able to use some of these systems, due to the amount of money they required. I was not there at the time, but one appeal of CLI (not TUI) is scripting. After a while, you have all your routine packaged in nice alias and commands. And that’s universal across all languages and projects.

zelphirkalt 4mo ago

Didn't Smalltalk environments have those features ages ago already?

pjmlp 4mo ago
It did, as did other Xerox systems, Interlisp-D, XDE and Cedar.

wk_end 4mo ago

I could've sworn VC++6 had Intellisense. I'm not going to dig too far to confirm but Wikipedia seems to agree with me (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_completion#Visual_Studio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_completion#Visual_Studio) - it's not a great reference but definitely implies that it was there: > the Visual Basic versions of IntelliSense were always more robust and complete than the 5.0 and 6.0 (97 and 98 in the Visual Studio naming sequence) versions of Visual C++

tom_ 4mo ago
I'm also pretty certain it did, and actually that VC++5 (that I'd used as a student) didn't. I'm less confident about go to definition and stuff, but I think that was all part and parcel of the same thing, so VC++6 had it and VC++5 didn't. (Just like today, it would sometimes fail to work, for no obvious reason, and it was impossible to figure out why, so perhaps for this article it had got itself into one of those situations...)

tosti 4mo ago

The problem wasn't the IDE, but win32 API documentation was very poorly written back then and lots of programs suffered because of it.

NuclearPM 4mo ago
That’s what this was for: https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/programming-windows-95-microsoft-programming-series_charles-petzold/501230/item/1863103/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=pmax_canada_high_17770447165&utm_adgroup=&utm_term=&utm_content=&gad_source=1&gad_campaignid=17425663805&gbraid=0AAAAADwY45g5EXATjM4ywoYi9Q__lrIOV&gclid=EAIaIQobChMI1-mHjYXflAMVfSrUAR2BtSbaEAQYBiABEgKUbvD_BwE#idiq=1863103&edition=2302929 https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/programming-windows-95-microso...

p0w3n3d 4mo ago

Still young people who have perseverance to load up old windows and VC deserve kudos

qingcharles 4mo ago

I thought we used VC++ 6 to write Abomination[1] but I guess it was VC++ 4 as the dates don't align. The serial cable debugger feature was a godsend. Had the game running on one PC and stepping through it on the other. VSS would kill us, though. Crazy that I'm still using the same IDE in 2026. [1] https://youtu.be/ESGevBO4KKA?t=682 https://youtu.be/ESGevBO4KKA?t=682