Microsoft slants Visual Studio 2015 for July 20 release, zeroes in on mobile developers

Dieter Holger

Posts: 39   +1

microsoft visual studio windows android ios visual studio 2015

Microsoft has announced that Visual Studio 2015 will be available 9 days prior to Windows 10. Along with Visual Studio, .NET Framework 4.6 will be distributed and there'll be an update to Team Foundation Server. Visual Studio 2015 is notoriously adding new development tools for Android and iOS, revealing Microsoft's desire of catering to mobile developers who're not just developing for Windows.

S. Somasegar, Microsoft's vice president of the Development Division, who announced the news, views mobile as a new platform but clearly sees the writing on the wall when it comes to Android and iOS dominating personal computing.

Microsoft's attempt to win over mobile developers with Visual Studio is an obvious move to get their software products better integrated on iOS and Android. Although Microsoft is still pumping resources into Windows Phone, supporting the two most popular mobile platforms is key to keeping the company's services relevant. The Register notes that some mobile development tools in Visual Studio come from third parties, such as Xamarin's compilers for running C# in iOS and Android or Apache Cordova, which lets you run apps made in HTML or JavaScript across platforms.

The adoption rates for Visual Studio 2015 as a mobile development platform should be interesting to see. But Microsoft still has a way to go if it wants to woo developers away from Xcode or Google's Android Developer Studio.

Alongside Visual Studio 2015's updates for mobile development, the software is also adding support for video game coding. Visual Studio 2015 will now back popular game engines like Unreal.

Additionally, Microsoft continues to push Azure, their cloud computing software, by improving its ease of use in Visual Studio. But Microsoft's Azure still lags behind Amazon's Web Services, which reigns as king of the cloud computing industry.

Back in March, Microsoft announced a reformed structure for Visual Studio 2015's product packaging. The main change is Microsoft's combination of their MSDN versions -- which is their in-house developer network -- of Visual Studio Premium and Visual Studio Ultimate into Visual Studio Enterprise 2015. Microsoft's ambitions for Visual Studio and the coding world in general is exciting, we'll just have to see if it pays off.

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I used it for 15 years, quit in 2013, not looking back.

For everything you can do in Visual Studio there are better and cheaper (often free) alternatives, while .NET has been in decline since 2012.
 
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VitalyT,

Since I'm fairly broke, can you share a few of those alternatives? I can't seem to find any (cheaper or better) alternatives that really works for Windows store app development. Do any of the alternatives have XAML designers and Tablet/Phone emulators? Will any of the alternate let me do XAML store apps, Android and iOS in the same IDE?
 
@Tempus, you'd have to look at each of them separately. Like for your XAML, http://www.kaxaml.com/ - free tool, while for Android and iOS there tons of alternatives, you can research them yourself.

I never developed for Windows Store, that's being too invested into Microsoft platform, so you would limit your own choices in IDE there, while the platform remains quite unpopular, compared to others.

In all, I'd say it's not a good decision getting into Microsoft technologies while being broke.

I've been developing in WebStorm for the last 2 years, and found it sufficient for everything, except .NET, of course, which I don't need at all.
 
I understand there are IDE's that are separate but having to run 2 (or three or more) just to do one thing seems like a productivity killer. Right now for example I'm working on a quote to create an LOB app that has the client requirements to run it on Windows Phone, Surface Tablets, Android phones and iPhones. If I pony up to renew my old MSDN subscription to get VS 2015, I can do that entire project in one IDE - sharing a good amount of the code. Doing that in 2 or 3 different IDE's with far less code reuse seems less advantageous.

While I agree the demand for 'commercial' Windows store apps is way below that of Android or iOS there is a rather strong need for side loaded LOB apps - at least in my client base. To be honest, I have no interest in selling anything for 99 cents or relying on micro-transactions to pay my rent. I'd have to sell over 160,000 of them just to break even for the year. Instead I chose to write actual business applications based on statements of work. I get real money, agreed to up front for the term of the development contract. I've never understood why developers suddenly thought devaluing their work was a good thing. Writing a good application takes time and that time should be worth more than .99 a copy. Anyway, I was really hoping you had found a single platform that would help reduce the expense of doing this cross platform development. Oh well, I'll just re-up the subscription.
 
@Tempus, you did misread into my post. I left Visual Studio 2 years ago because I stopped developing for .NET, and outside of .NET, Visual Studio is quite pointless. And if you need .NET, then you are stuck with Visual Studio.

They are trying to fix this by further bloating an already massive product with all the current tools, like Node JS and Web UI frameworks, better JavaScript UI, but it's all kind of late to the party for people who have moved on to other tools, like ones from JetBrains.
 
I used it for 15 years, quit in 2013, not looking back.

For everything you can do in Visual Studio there are better and cheaper (often free) alternatives, while .NET has been in decline since 2012.

Not really sure I agree with you that .Net has been in decline since 2012... The feature-set is continuously improving and so is Visual Studio. I've used Eclipse and IntelliJ IDEA for some JAVA stuff in the past. Both horrible compared to VS, IMHO. So I'm curious... what server-side language do you think is on the up-swing and what IDE do you think is better than VS?
 
Not really sure I agree with you that .Net has been in decline since 2012...

You disagree on what basis? https://www.dice.com/skills/C#.html/?icid=dicenewsES

I've used Eclipse and IntelliJ IDEA for some JAVA stuff in the past. Both horrible compared to VS, IMHO

I've been using WebStorm for the last 2 years, and I think it is much better for web development than VS.

what server-side language do you think is on the up-swing and what IDE do you think is better than VS?

Node JS is on the rise, taking the market share away from VS. WebStorm is the best tool for Node JS development, but there are many alternatives out there today.
 
@VitalyT, I'm the other way around. I have to agree with you a few years ago where you have to buy VS to get extensions and other nice features found in premium/ultimate editions. After MS released a community editionsthat will allow users to load extensions, and made several features nice tools such as debugging for free, I have to say it's the best productivity IDE for .NET, and web development.

WebStorm is the best in angularJS and nodejs prior to VS 2015. Its intelisense is much better than VS 2013, but VS 2015 changed that. I have much respect for JetBrains their Resharper and memory profiling tools for .NET is the best and easiest that I found, but WebStorm loads slower and looks old for me. Reminds me of my PHP days back in the early 2000's.

It seems that you're in the Java world, so I can't tell you more if VS will be best suited for you as a one IDE for both web development and Java, but I believe VS 2015 have a way to use it for Java development. There was a Minecraft mod developer who spoke in //Build 2015 and demoed Java mod development for Minecraft using VS 2015.

In the end to each is own, but I believe VS 2015 (post Balmer MS era) is worth a try.

For me, I'm loving VS 2015 (preview) for Xamarin (iOS/Android), C++, and web development! MS keep it up with embracing cross-platform development.
 
You disagree on what basis? https://www.dice.com/skills/C#.html/?icid=dicenewsES



I've been using WebStorm for the last 2 years, and I think it is much better for web development than VS.



Node JS is on the rise, taking the market share away from VS. WebStorm is the best tool for Node JS development, but there are many alternatives out there today.


I disagree based n the fact that you cherry-picking a single website, does not make an opinion, fact. See, I can do it too:
http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html
http://venturebeat.com/2014/02/03/the-most-popular-coding-languages-for-2014-are/

I've never used WebStorm, so I'm curious as to what it does better than Visual Studio? I'm using VS2013 and the new VS2015 preview and the intellisense for JS is amazing and they even have pre-processor plugin support.

I've looked at Node.js, but the database is severely lacking compared to .Net and since most Enterprise development centers around MS SQL Server or Oracle, that pretty much disqualifies it for my company. That, and we prefer compiled languages. For a list of .Net's advantages over Node, please see here: http://vschart.com/compare/node-js/vs/asp-net-mvc-framework
 
I've looked at Node.js, but the database is severely lacking compared to .Net and since most Enterprise development centers around MS SQL Server or Oracle

I don't know where you looked at, but there more ORM-s for SQL and Oracle under Node JS these days than under .NET, and their number is only growing and fast.
 
I used it for 15 years, quit in 2013, not looking back.

For everything you can do in Visual Studio there are better and cheaper (often free) alternatives, while .NET has been in decline since 2012.

I prefer VS to any other ide, VS community is free and almost everything that the premium VS offers except team integration.
 
I also prefer VS to to other IDE's. I know Microsoft-bashing is still as trendy as it ever was, but for me none of the other IDEs come close. Given that the free version - VS Community - is now essentially identical to VS Pro and so supports all the same plugins and features as Pro, there's no competition. I only drop back to other IDEs when writing Java as the Java support in Studio has always been poor. But I find the clunkiness of other IDEs jarring and always feel relieved to come back to Studio when coding any other language - .NET / C++ / JavaScript / XAML / TypeScript etc
 
VitalyT,

Since I'm fairly broke, can you share a few of those alternatives? I can't seem to find any (cheaper or better) alternatives that really works for Windows store app development. Do any of the alternatives have XAML designers and Tablet/Phone emulators? Will any of the alternate let me do XAML store apps, Android and iOS in the same IDE?
Check out Visual Studio Community Edition which is totally free and is essentially what would have previously been Visual Studio professional edition.
 
Seeing people with 20+ years of trade kinda makes me feel new to this.
I have been developing for .net since the first release, some 12-13 years ago. At that time and until around 2009 I have been splitting my work between c# / c++ and java... I have never really found an IDE that is better than VS. I think people just love to bash MS but really, everything else just pales in comparison. They might do somethings better than VS, but there is nothing that comes closer to it in overall terms.

Node.Js is a fad (IMFHO) like others were before it. Because MS didn't jump on it right away and made it a hot thing in previous VS versions, it doesn't mean the IDE is bad. There are free tools out there for pretty much anything, but I dare anyone to craft an usable toolbox that even gets close to VS productivity.
I don't know if webstorm has a free/community version, but I'm willing to bet my balls that if it does, its very inferior to VS CE.
 
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