How do you rate Visual C++ .NET?????????

[qednick]

Hi All,

I'm thinking of actually buying Visual C++ .NET and I was looking on amazon.com for some feedback. Most of which appears negative!! I wondered what experience anyone on tek-tips had with it in comparison to VC++ 6.0??? Would it be worth upgrading now or - as one amazon.com reviewer points out - would I be better waiting until all the teething troubles are sorted out first?

[sup]programmer (prog'ram'er), n A hot-headed, anorak wearing, pimple-faced computer geek.[/sup]​

 

[xwb]

Depends on what you want to do with it. .net is nothing more than all languages compiling to the same base language so you do not have compatibility problems going from perl to cobol to C++. Some things about VC7

1) The editor has more facilities (like outline mode and commenting out whole sections). It now has either a tabbed interface or an MDI interface. The tabbed interface is still a bit buggy - if you open too many files, the tabs are there but the filenames disappear.

2) The menus have been rationalized - Settings... is now Properties..., so, like moving from Word 2.0 to Word 98, you'll have teething problems finding where everything is. You may have to add buttons to the toolbars. Compile program isn't there by default but you can always use Ctrl-F7.

3) Your V6 macros won't work at all.

4) It takes a while to figure out the window docking.

5) It doesn't look as pretty - the rebars are a bunch of small dashes instead of a raised bevel line.

6) The project/workspace files are now in XML. No longer a simple text file. If you have a wizard that modifies them, these will need to be changed.

7) Unicode is better supported.

8) Some MFC stuff is now ATL.

 

[qednick]

Hmmmmm.... thanks for that xwb! Anybody else have any opinions?

[sup]programmer (prog'ram'er), n A hot-headed, anorak wearing, pimple-faced computer geek.[/sup]​

 

[chipperMDW]

If you're going to go with C++.NET, you might be better off waiting for the next release. That one's supposedly going to be extremely compliant to the C++ Standard, (Microsoft finally started attending the Standards meetings), so there will be fewer problems with templates and namespaces and other previously "buggy" areas.

 

[qednick]

thanks for that chipper - I think I'll buy a new laptop instead and worry about .net later!

[sup]programmer (prog'ram'er), n A hot-headed, anorak wearing, pimple-faced computer geek.[/sup]​

 

[tootired]

No-one has mentioned how the compiled code runs on a target machine. My experience is that "runs" is the wrong word - it takes A LONNNNNNNG time to load the program. For this reason, I'm sticking to VC6 until running .Net programs is a bit more straight-forward.

Happy New Year...

tootired