gamedevlists-windows

[GD-Windows] Visual Studio 2005

[Chris R. <c....@gm...>]

Visual Studio 2005 has been released recently (today?), and I find
myself in the position of manually searching through tons of
marketing-voodoo on Microsoft's Visual Studio site.

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++ ?). 

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

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.

Maybe someone on this list with access to the early-beta's can shed some
light on these topics for me. I gave up on the MS site feeling rather
confused and lost after an hour. 


regards and thanks in advance, 
Chris Raine

RE: [GD-Windows] Visual Studio 2005

[Bryan W. <br...@xm...>]

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

RE: [GD-Windows] Visual Studio 2005

[Chris R. <c....@gm...>]

> 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. 
We have been using cppunit for quite a while now and are quite satisfied
with it's usability. It is just sad that there is no IDE integration for
it, all usage of cppunit has to be done by hand (creating a test-file,
adding test-cases, etc). 

> 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.
We have been using the ref++ plugin from http://www.refpp.com . Again,
here the drawback is that ref++ needs to rebuild it's parsing cache
everytime you want to use it (and that can become a pain with large
projects). I am not aware of other refactoring tools/plugins for c++ for
visual studio.

> 
> They integrated FxCop, which isn't too surprising since it came from MS to
> begin with.
That tool does static and dynamic code analysis for managed assemblies?
What about code analysis, especially profiling, for native applications?

In VS 6 they had this not very powerful, but still useful, profiling
option for c/c++ code. 

Somehow it vanished in VS.Net and I miss it. We purchased several
licenses of Intel VTune to replace it - a very nice suite of tools for
performance analysis if it does not get confused and lose synbol
information for your project.

> 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.  

To add to that, it seems as if you get into license hell with it. It
seems as if everybody on the team would need to have a user license to
access the foundation server, plus a client license to use the client
tools. Seems as if we will stick to python scripts and bugzilla for now.

Seems as if I have not missed much in the last year. All this marketing
voodoo sounded to good to be true. 

Thanks for your insights!

regards, 
Chris Raine