Microsoft's latest creation. As I write it's in
Beta 1, and I'm installing it. It comes on four CDs, one of which is a pre-setup setup, which takes longer to run than the actual setup, and installs all sorts of "
useful" things, such as
IE 5.5, and
Microsoft Frontpage 2000 extensions. Even if you haven't got a web server. How does that work?
In it,
Visual Basic comes of age, gaining
inheritance,
initialisers,
multithreading, and
structured exeption handling (at long bloody last). And they chopped out a few useless pieces of language (gosub, etc.)
VB also includes several new features which you could only prevoiusly do using API calls and subclassing. Tray icons as an ActiveX control. And W2K Alpha blending (at least in part).
Visual C++ becomes even more
bloatware, partly because it now shares its IDE with the aforementioned Basic, and the new kid on the block,
C# (that's
C Sharp, apparently). C#. Hmmm. If you ignore the
corny name, where does that leave it?
Well, it's rather a cross between
Java,
VB,
C++, and a
hamster. In varying proportions.
The other new thing in the masterpiece that is Visual Studio.net, is the marvellously useful capability to spontaneously change language. Yes, if you're programming in
C++ and fancy a bit of the old
C#, you can! Yes! You too can program on app in three different languages! Also common runtimes between all the languages.
The
IDE is pretty intuitive.
Microsoft have again taken it upon themselves to break their own
UI rules. Menus are white, although the menu bars are
gray. I quite like them. But they are wrong.
The downside:
SPEED.
Beta 1 is so slow. It brought my dual
Celeron 550 with 128Mb of RAM to it's knees. It is only just usable. I hop
MS speed it up before the final version, or I will not be buying my customary
Enterprise Edition.