Microsoft MSDN Blogs

I think this is awesome. For all the people that are complaining about not being open source and not friendly to hackers, the truth is probably most people that program Raspberry are not even using a native compiled language but are using Python. The people that want to hack on a kernel, can install Linux.

I am really excited about the prospect of Microsoft enabling writing and debugging for the Pi using Visual Studio. They already have the feature for android in the Visual Studio 2015 Preview[1] and making it work for Raspberry Pi on running Windows should be easy. With an excellent development environment and debugger, I think interest in C/C++ programming for the Pi will be increased as it will be more accessible.

[1] http://blogs.msdn.com/b/vcblog/archive/2014/12/05/developing-native-activity-applications-for-the-android-platform.aspx

It might not be usable/in use - but doesn't nuget support c++? http://blogs.msdn.com/b/vcblog/archive/2013/04/26/nuget-for-c.aspx

> Anyone here unhappy with pip?

Pip has (had) a number of issues (mostly related to pypi/availability) -- but pip+virtualenvs is something I use all the time, and am very happy with.

The ease with which one can simply:

virtualenv some_experiment # --no-site-packages
# is now standard! yay!
./some_experiment/bin/pip install -U pip distribute
# sadly needed -- but gets us pip list --outated, which
# is very helpful
./some_experiment/bin/pip install <thing-to-test>

And then just work with that, without even having to mess around with sourcing the "activate" script etc for most packages is great. No clutter under /usr/local, no broken system tools due to some dependency being pulled in etc.

> There is PowerShell which gives you more flexibility, but in my experience I have found PowerShell to be slow.

Powershell can be a little slow to launch. Actual execution speed is pretty respectable. It does get faster after the first couple of times as it will ngen stuff into the GAC (this is particularly bad on new Windows installs where little .Net code has previously ran in any contexts).

It can be fixed by running a script like this:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/powershell/archive/2008/09/02/speeding-up-powershell-startup-updating-update-gac-ps1.aspx

Which will populate the GAC.

> It also has a totally different set of syntactic rules which aren't worth my time to learn.

You're missing out. Powershell's syntax is quite intuitive after you learn the basics, you quickly start to be able to guess commands and params.

But Visual studio doesn't imply Microsoft's C++. There's clang-cl (http://clang.llvm.org/docs/UsersManual.html#clang-cl), which aims to be a drop-in replacement for Microsoft's compiler (haven't used it, so I don't know its quality)

Also, Visual Studio 2015 will ship with clang (http://blogs.msdn.com/b/vcblog/archive/2014/11/12/visual-studio-2015-preview-now-available.aspx). Yes, that's for Android (and, in the future, iOS) only, but it would not surprise me if that it is a sign of things to come: either Microsoft starts following developments faster, or people will move to clang for development. And I doubt the current Microsoft would be bothered if their customers moved to use clang, as long as they kept using Microsoft technologies (even if that's limited to running on Azure)

Microsoft's official position is that any greenfield project should be in C++ and for those developers that really want a C compiler there are other options.

Specially in a world where most APIS are either .NET or transitioning to COM/Windows Runtime.

At last year's "Connect(); Microsoft Visual Studio vNext & Azure", they confirmed the C++ focus for native code, besides the upcoming .NET Native.

https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Visual-Studio/Connect-event-2014/029

The C99 support that has been added was what is required by C++ standard and some specific customers.

Even the new C runtime is actually implemented in C++ with the functions exposed as extern "C".

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/vcblog/archive/2014/06/10/the-great-crt-refactoring.aspx

> Microsoft will support IE until Jan 2016.

Uh... [1]

Beginning January 12, 2016, the following operating systems
and browser version combinations will be supported:

Windows Vista SP2 Internet Explorer 9
Windows Server 2008 SP2 Internet Explorer 9
...

After January 12, 2016, only the most recent version of Internet
Explorer available for a supported operating system will receive
technical support and security updates.

They go on to talk about how Windows 7's Enterprise Mode will be supported until 2020 so you can still keep IE kicking around well beyond 2016.

[1] http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2014/08/07/stay-up-to-date-with-internet-explorer.aspx