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