RE: Visual Studio 2005

On Friday, October 28, 2005 4:55 PM
Chris Raine said:

> I would like to know which improvements to Visual Studio regarding C++
development have been added (subquestion : What about automated
unit-tests, refactoring for C++ ?).

VS2005 has had betas available for about a year.  I'm surprised you haven't
tried it out, at least to see if your code still compiles. ;-)

After the initial shock of every file needing to irrevocably migrate from
the 2003 format to the 2005 format, it looks pretty good.  (C'mon people,
it's XML; you shouldn't need to do that any more...)  There are many
incremental improvements.  There are many additions that seem more like
trying to compete with the free and commercial plug-ins.  It looks a lot
more like office.  It integrates with the other apps, for better or worse.

The tools you mentioned have been available through other means for quite
some time, even outside the VS2005 betas.  We've been using better tools and
I feel like MS is just trying to play catch up on them.

Their unit test tools would be good if they were the only game in town, but
there are cppunit and nunit that MS has to compete with.  You might notice
that in most of the MS Developers' presentations, they have the
TestDriven.net plug-in installed on their VS2005 systems. 

Refactoring tools (both free and commercial) have been around for quite some
time and MS's short list of features look like the bare minimum that they
could get away with and still call it "refactoring tools".  If you want a
serious tool for that, look elsewhere.  The refactoring offerings in MS's
betas have been lackluster.  Spend the money and buy 3rd party if you are
serious about doing it.

They integrated FxCop, which isn't too surprising since it came from MS to
begin with.

> And what is this Team Server or Team Foundation thing all about? What
benefits would my development team have if we start using it?

They are collaboration tools that you might (or might not) find useful.
There are a lot of good features in there for end-to-end tracking: from the
bug report to the final feedback.  We liked some of the features, but
decided to stay away from it in the end because our existing tools offered
the features we needed, were free, and have already been customized to fit
our environment.  

> What about nice features tailored towards game development (asset
management, etc) ? I read about a special version of Visual Studio 2005
tailored for game developers a few months ago, but I cannot find a
single reference to game development on Microsoft's VS site.

You might be referring to XNA and XNA Studio.  I've read about it but
haven't seen anything beyond marketing.  Others might know more about it.
 
I have heard through the grapevine that the version control in TFS is
moderately good at handling binary assets, but I haven't looked in to that
either.  Our asset chain is pretty good already.  I know they updated Visual
SourceSafe, but it still uses file shares so I wouldn't trust it.  

As always, your mileage may vary.

bryan



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