Why does Microsoft have to make things VERY COMPLICATED for programmers?
I have been studying C in UNIX systems for past few months and now i am trying to learn programming in windows, but it's just real pain in the *** to catch up what microsoft have been adding to its operating system for past decades. I mean like they have CLR, ATL, MFC, API, CLI, Managed Extensions, .NET framework, toonnnnes of libraries that take ages to read, and even their own version of C++!! WTF! Why can't they redesign their operating system, clean up all the mess they have done? I mean programming in windows just brings me into whole 'nother level you know? Even their simplest system calls have at least 5,6,7 arguments, and system variables have undecipherable names that take ages to read. And they expect newcomers to catch up all that bullshit stuff? Wow. Funny thing is this is my third year in computer science course, but we haven't even touched neither C++ or Windows systems in depth. So how is university going to prepare me as a skillful software developer if all i'm learning is UNIX and Suns operating systems with either low-level procedural programming language like C or highest-level language like Haskel, Scheme, Ocaml when the majority of the software companies is using Windows with C++??? I mean ok, maybe computer science is about the theory of computation, but c'mon, who would ever want to create an OS from scratch using Ocaml?? Where's the practicality? Ok sorry for the rant. My real question is 'why is windows programming so hard?', and a good guide book recommendation for beginners would be very much appreciated.
How much more efficient would Microsoft be if they stopped using .NET and all other languages that don't exist outside of MS?
Let me remind you oft the start of .Net over 17 years ago. In the beginning MS wanted to use Java instead of C# (wasn’t even conceived at that time). Sun (now owned by Oracle) the owners of Java didn’t like the way Microsoft wrote there own compiler for the “Open Source” programming language Java. So they sued and and MS stopped to use Java for .Net.Yes Google could have foreseen the trouble they got into Oracle for using Java. A lesson Microsoft made the hard way 17 years ago. From this moment on till recently open source software was cancer and very dangerous for Microsoft. That is where all the hate for open source came from Ballmer.So they made there own thing with C# and all the .Net ecosystem. 17 years later Java lags behind, is outdated and it seems to be not actively worked on by Oracle. Oracle is only interested in suing there successful clients which have money for using Java.No one in there right mind would abandon such a feature rich ecosystem which they invested 15+ years of active development for such a reason as “don’t use things from MS”. If you imagine that many thing from MS are based of using .Net, MS would have to rewrite almost all there things and services. That would be really silly to do and could end MS in the long run.
Why does it take so overly long to install visual studio and why does it need a restart?
The installer is SO inefficient. msiexec was running for this and used a bit over 30 minutes of single core CPU time on my overclocked 3.3GHZ X9100 CPU and vs_community.exe a bit over 10 minutes. I have an SSD. It was a repair install. But when first installing the software, took a long time too.It was a typical install, not a full ~27GB installation. It was a repair install.Way inefficient. It was downloading as it was installing packages and it certainly seems that my ~25Mb/s download speed was faster than my laptop could handle installing the packages. I could kill the internet and it would continue installing for a few minutes each time until I re-enabled WIFI again. BTW, WOULD NOT give an error message if it loses the internet connection, it would stay at the install screen with no error messages forever if it still needed to download packages. Very poor design.I bet a new laptop with NVME SSD and with a 6700HQ / 6820HK would struggle doing a typical VS studio 2015 repair install or straight install in under 20 minutes.
What is the purpose of Visual Studio? Any vital links.
Thanks for the A2A.The answer that have already been given are great. So in addition to those, I would add this…Put simply Visual Studio is a tool for writing code. As others have mentioned, it supports writing code in all kinds of languages including non-Microsoft languages.Of course, you can also write code with notepad, or notepad++ or sublime text (my favorite one). These are text editors. Text editors are lightweight and fast but they offer few helps for writing your code. (Although sublime text supports some extensions that help a little bit.)A bit up the scale is Visual Studio Code which is a fairly new lightweight, open-source editor that is multi-platform (runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux) is extensible, offers a lot of helps (intellisense, debugging, basic refactors, etc. ) but does not do as much for you as full Visual Studio. It is like an powerful text editor.On the other end of the scale is full Visual Studio. This level of editor is called an Integrated Development Environment or IDE. It is important to note that Visual Studio is a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT product from Visual Studio Code despite sharing the name. It only runs on Windows and there are multiple SKUs. One of the SKUs is free (Community Edition…CE) but still very powerful. The others are not free (and in fact, quite expensive) but give you increasingly powerful features.One fact about ALL of the SKUs (including CE) is that they all support the use of Xamarin, a powerful tool for creating cross-platform mobile application with code-sharing even when targeting iOS and Android.Microsoft also very recently released a new IDE, Visual Studio for Mac, but I know very little about it except to say it is an excellent choice for doing cross-platform Xamarin development. (Compiling iOS apps with Xamarin requires a Mac. And you can still use your Mac to do Android development).IDEs offer a huge number of features to support software development but are NOT lightweight. The IDE loads slow, and opening projects tend to be slow, too. But once loaded, you get a ton of features to aid your development (Intellisense, Code Completion, Refactoring, Snippets, Project Templates, Solution Templates, Database integration, builds, deployments, and extensibility to make it even more powerful with third party plug-ins, called extensions.Most developers who write C# every day use Visual Studio Professional or higher.
Which is easier to use, Visual Studio Code or Jetbrains?
JetBrains what?JetBrains has a lot tools for developers of a lot of different areas.Front-End devsBack-End devsGames devsDBA’ sAnd moreSo if you mean to compare Microsoft Visual Studio Code against JetBrains Tools i have to say that i as a CS i use VSCode and some of JetBrains IDE's.And in my personal opinion i have to say that i use them for different purposes VSCode i use for Web Dev and the IDE's i use from JetBrains are:RiderPycharmIntellij IDEAClionTho i can download some extensions for the languages that those IDE's are created for, the plenty of things these IDE's offers are mind blowing some times.For beginners it's a headache to have to configure VSCode for a language having to deal unknown things.Most of the JetBrains tools aren't free so that's one of “bad things” but hey i can tell it worth it also you don't have to configure to many things to go.In conclusion: working with IDE's makes you more productive with the plenty of amazing improvements their owners always make, with autocomplition, refactoring the majesty of the code edition features I'm just in love.So i think it'll always be an “it depends” thing because of the variety of needs out there.
Is it okay if I started on the visual c# instead of the original c# where it contains console apps?
C# is just the language. Visual / whatever else is about the tool you use to edit your source code - not the language itself. In fact all IDEs which can do C# are also "visual" in that you design forms through GUI interaction and that stuff like autocomplete / intellisense shows up as you type. There's no "original C#" which isn't also "visual" C#, in fact the "original" tool to write C# would be Visual Studio.By visual, do you mean you started something like a WinForms based project instead of a console program (note all the C# IDEs I've seen can do both)? If so, then it depends on your task. You can do all the things in a winform (or WPF / GTK# / etc.) graphical program you can in a console. Though if you wanted to read input from the keyboard, or write output to the standard out, it would entail you do some extra stuff (not typical in a GUI app). Or you can do your input from / output to GUI elements in the form instead, though that would need a bit more than just WriteLine / ReadLines.If you mean you just want to learn. Then it's fine. either way would give you similar experiences. Just that with GUI things you'd need to learn extras while you're also learning the basics. E.g. you'd need to learn to use the visual forms designer, apply events to form elements, etc. That would not be necessary using a console project. So you may find that part of the GUI project would make it more complicated to learn the basics. This is usually why beginner tutorials tend to show console stuff first (simple input output without a lot of extras to learn).If you mean you're using the Visual Studio IDE ... then there's absolutely nothing wrong at all. That is the most common way to write any C# code, and you'd be best placed to learn that. There are alternatives like SharpDevelop and MonoDevelop/Xamarin Studio, but they effectively do the same stuff Visual Studio does. You really don't "need" to write your C# code in an editor and then use command-line-calls for compiling, though it might teach you some stuff few others have actually learnt.
How can you differentiate C, C++, Visual C++, C#, Visual C# ?
Lets start from the begining :) In 1971 two computer engineers Kerringhan and Ritchie developed a language which could be portable to different machine, their objective was to develop a high level language which gives them power of a low level language and still have sufficiently human comprehensible code. The result was a language they named as C. The nomenclature came from an earlier language which was called BCPL or in short just B, so they termed thier langauge as C. C became tremendously successful as it was powerful, easy to understand and easy to program with, giving a lot of flexibility to the programmer. It was termed as 'The Programmers´Language´ and one of the first sucess of C was UNIX which was written using C. In late 70s when the computer programs were getting bigger and more complex, a new concept was introduced which was that of Object Oriented Programing (OOP). Richard Stroustrup started building the foundations of an Object Oriented version of C. His first results were a highly modified (in syntax and type checking etc) version of C and he named his new version C++, basing his name on the ++ operator used by C which increments the value by 1. There were many IDE for both languages, most famous at the time were from Borland, named as Turbo C and Turbo C++. Later, with the advent of Windows based Operating System and introduction of Microsoft Foundation Classes, Microsoft introduces its own versions of IDE for C and C++. Microsoft named them ´Visual C´and ´Visual C++´. Note that these two are not separate languages, but just new IDEs, though there were certain syntax restrictions put in by Microsoft, which makes them a little different from thier ANSI counterparts. C# is another adventure of Microsoft which uses the CLR and .NET framework. This is a new language which appears to me more of a newer version of JAVA rather then C (both languages use a similar syntax and program architecture) as it incorporates more feature of a ´secure´JAVA then the loose barrelled C. IDE for C# is called Visual C# carrying on the nomenclature of ´Visual´for Microsoft. Hope this helps. Just as a footnote, C is my personal favourite programing language.
What's the difference between HTML and Visual Basic?
HTML and VB are competely different, but can be used together. HTML is purely for visual stuff.. it is static and cannot be changed without going back into the html code and changing it.. You can obviously build a website with only this.. VB can make things dynamic, so for example a page can be personalised per user. You would also need to VB (or another language) to create an online shop, because you would need to use VB (or something) to tell the page how much to charge people and how to take their money. Now this may be a weird analogy but my friend asked me the same thing the other day (I am a programmer). I said HTML can give you a static hand.. but if you want the hand to move you must add some VB (or other coding language) Ok an awful explanation.. but what you need to know is.. 1: if you want to build websites you definitly need to know HTML 2: if you want those websites to do anything other than just display stuff you need to learn something like VB (or c#, PHP,Java...)
Why is it so difficult to set up a C++ build environment on Windows?
Under Windows, you have basically two compiler choices: Microsoft's Visual C++ Compiler (MSVC) or GCC.If MSVC is your choice, things are quite simple: You install MS Visual Studio and start writing Win32 applications in C++.If you prefer GCC, things get a little messy: It is designed to work on Unix-line systems. So, if you want to use it, you must set up at least a minimal system that will match the dependencies of GCC. You can use MinGW and MSYS to do that job. An alternative is Cygwin which provides a UNIX-like environment, core utilities, and required tools, including GCC.The next part is configuring your IDE to use GCC. That part can be easy or not depending on IDE's capabilities. For example, Code:Blocks does all the things by itself including MinGW installation/configuration. You can just run it an start coding. For Eclipse, you must install C/C++ development tools plugin and set GCC compiler location under preferences. But under linux, it automatically detects GCC which cames by default.Setting up a build environment under Windows for coding in C is a little bit harder, because you cannot create a C project in Visual Studio (there are configurations/workaround guides to do this on internet if you really want to write C code in VS).In conclusion, it is not difficult at all if you know what you are doing. Just go step by step, knowing what you need to do and why it is required.