Msvs

[Velocity]

I love microsoft visual studios 2010, its like all my languages in one, its so organized and efficient, my girlfriend knew what to buy me lol... she doesnt even like computers haha


P.S. It costs 650$ :O

[chrisbrown]

I really hope your girlfriend didn't spend $650 on a glorified text editor that you probably could have downloaded for free...

[mirhagk]

glorified text editor? Lol spoken like someone who hasn't put a lot of time into it.

It's pretty much everything you need for programming built into one thing, source control system, compiler, debugger, database manager, IDE.

In fact if there's something you can't do with it, it's more likely that it's because you haven't learned enough about or haven't used the ultimate edition.

Yeah and the pro version is free to students, but the ultimate version is amazing.

[RandomLetters]

I tried to program VB in notepad once for homework. Eventually, I just gave up and wrote notes to myself on where to add components when I got back to school.

But that's besides the point.

Grats! you have an awesome girlfriend

[Insectoid]

I like having an IDE for really verbose languages (*cough*Java*cough*) just so I don't have to scour hundreds of useless docs in a bloated API for the one function I need. I use NetBeans for Java, and a text editor with syntax highlighting for everything else. There is no way in hell I'd pay $650 for a text editor. I don't care what features it has. Free syntax highlighter (any code editor, really) + free compiler (even VS's compiler is free) + free debugger (Thanks GNU!) + free source control system (git) + free database manager (I'm sure it exists) > $650 for the same stuff in one package.

Sure, I'd have to learn every tool individually, but that's a damn sight better than $650 for a piece of software I'd also have to learn to use.

[mirhagk]

And that's why you get the free version of Visual studio, and only use the paid version if you are working for a company. If over the course of it's lifetime (potentially 40 hours a week*52 weeks a year*~3 years before a new one comes out 6240)
It saves you like 30 hours of work (assuming you get $20 an hour) then you saved money by buying it. Most likely the built in debugging features will save you much more than 1% of your time.

[Insectoid]

Quote:

Most likely the built in debugging features will save you much more than 1% of your time.

And free alternatives won't?

[mirhagk]

Do free alternatives let you set a breakpoint/jump to the line that crashed, hover over variables to see their values, add lines of code, and continue execution?

[Insectoid]

Yep. Maybe not with mouseover, but yep.

[TerranceN]

Quote:

Yeah and the pro version is free to students, but the ultimate version is amazing.

I got the ultimate version for free through UW/dreamspark.

Since this has turned into a discussion of editors/IDEs, I might as well mention the text editor Vim.

I've been using Vim for a couple months now and I've been completely blown away by it. If you can get past Vim's gigantic learning curve, you can edit code so much quicker. Just last weekend I was using visual studio to re-learn some XNA stuff, and programming in it felt so awkward and slow, with no features to match many of my most used features of Vim (and the plugins that try to emulate vim are usually buggy or cost money, and don't allow anywhere near the level of customization that vim does). This is a good example of the kind of features I mean (also using regex is really useful). Even today I learned something awesome. And best of all using vimscript makes nearly everything customizable. You can re-bind keys, binding them to other key combinations, function calls, shell calls, etc. And people write amazing plugins like NERDTree, and OmniCppComplete that make vim feel more like an IDE and a text editor. And if you don't like part of the plugin, since it's all in vimscript too, you can go change it.

As for using visual studio, here is a very relevant article I found a little while back.
relevant portion:

Quote:

The law of leaky abstractions means that whenever somebody comes up with a wizzy new code-generation tool that is supposed to make us all ever-so-efficient, you hear a lot of people saying "learn how to do it manually first, then use the wizzy tool to save time." Code generation tools which pretend to abstract out something, like all abstractions, leak, and the only way to deal with the leaks competently is to learn about how the abstractions work and what they are abstracting. So the abstractions save us time working, but they don't save us time learning.

[DemonWasp]

Eclipse lets you do pretty much anything you want while debugging. I'm not sure about the CDT plugin (used for C, C++), but last I heard it was pretty good. It'll also get you everything else mirhagk mentioned, plus team synchronizing plugins.

All free.

[mirhagk]

In regards to Eclipse having these features, are they disabled for android app development? Can you re-enable them?

I found in frustrate searching through the log browser to find where the exception occured (since every function call since the exception apparently needed to be in the log too).

I would really like to see a system that is as well integrated as using visual studio's features. Sure the individual features might exist in other tools, but the lack of integration or cohesiveness is the problem.

And regardless the points stands. If your not a student, and your actually a developer full time, $650 is a tiny cost to pay if it saves you even 1% of your productivity. Software somehow being better because it's free is only true when your a hobbyist, in the professional world it's a lie.

[Insectoid]

Quote:

Software somehow being better because it's free is only true when your a hobbyist, in the professional world it's a lie.

It's not better because it's free. It's at least equal, where the only significant difference is cost, at which VS is worse.

[mirhagk]

The merits of which are better or worse could be disputed, personally I think a single piece of software that was designed to do all the things you need is better integrated then a set of tools that mimic the same behavior.

Regardless of whether you can prove it's non-inferiority, the price means pretty much nothing to someone who has a job and uses it for that.

[DemonWasp]

I don't know much about Android development, having never done any myself. This looks pretty decent, though: http://developer.android.com/sdk/eclipse-adt.html (first google result). Android runs a language that's very similar to Java, but not quite the same (and therefore subtly incompatible).

Exception traces are generated by the JRE itself, not Eclipse. They hold the exact amount of information I would expect: the method that generated the exception is on the top of the stack, and as you descend, you find all the methods in the chain that resulted in the excepting call. If the exceptions are chained, you see root-cause exceptions. I'm not sure what else you would expect.

I've never found a pay-for development system that was easier to use than free equivalents (or, sometimes, generic text editors). Maybe I'm just using the wrong languages for that (Java, C, C++, Python, Perl, Javascript, ...). Maybe I just haven't spent the time looking, because the tools I use have never prompted enough frustration to bother.

Price-wise, $650 is an upgrade from a hunk-of-garbage dev machine to a powerful-monster dev machine. Guess where I'd rather spend the money?