Visual Studio Blog

I have run into this problem in two cases:

1. When writing a COM add-in for a host application. When the application wants to shut down, the add-in must release all references to the objects of the host application, otherwise the process doesn't shut down. (At least with the application I'm currently writing an add-in for!)

2. When using out-of-process COM servers such as Excel from another application. This tends to leave lots of "excel.exe" processes running unless you explicitly release everything.

See for example: https://www.add-in-express.com/creating-addins-blog/2013/11/05/release-excel-com-objects/

Here is Microsoft describing how they ran into this problem when mixing COM and .NET in Visual Studio, how they solved it using Marshal.ReleaseComObject, how that itself caused other problems later when they combined it with CCW, and ... I'm not sure what their ultimate correct solution was:

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/vcblog/2006/09/19/mixing-deterministic-and-non-deterministic-cleanup/

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/visualstudio/2010/03/01/marshal-releasecomobject-considered-dangerous/

I am aware of UWP bringing COM back into fashion again, which is why I'm interested in potentially using Kotlin Native with it. :)

> I'll take MS's commitment to F# seriously when they stop treating it like a 2nd class citizen.

If you're waiting for Microsoft to give exactly equal resources to both C# and F#, you'll be waiting forever. Just like you'll be waiting for equal resources given to Visual Basic, TypeScript, PowerShell, VBA...

Equal splits never happen in a competitive situation. 60/40 splits are much more common, but here in this case, we have many first-party languages, so you'd expect a more complicated split, just as we see now.

> .NET Core 2.0 is in preview and there is ZERO support for F# with .NET Core in Visual Studio 2017

That's coming in the next update. (https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/visualstudio/2017/05/10/update-to-visual-studio-2017-and-next-preview/) You've been able to run F# in .NET Core in preview form going back to the 1.1 series.

My opinion is that .NET Core is the real bag of hurt here, not F#. Stop sticking your hand in that blender. Use Mono and open source F# until .NET Core stops changing the world on each release.

> VSCode is no Visual Studio

And neither one is Vim.

Are we really going to have another editor war? :)

I've wondered about this, in the context of generating skeleton Typescript definition files automatically by analysing the source of the library. It appears that Tern (http://ternjs.net/) is the most advanced project for extracting this kind of information from Javascript source files, and can be used as an editor plugin for some degree of intelligent autocompletion. You could also potentially use Esprima (http://esprima.org/doc/) to analyse the AST.

The old Visual Studio Javascript autocomplete engine apparently worked in a similar way to what you suggest, running the code in a sandbox and then analysing the types, but they've now moved to a static engine (which I think is also used in VS Code?) - some information at https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/visualstudio/2016/04/08/previewing-salsa-javascript-language-service-visual-studio-15/

> Visual Studio should read in all the files, restoring to open the ones I had open last time and allow me to start editing immediately while still loading the rest in the background.

It's already done this for a few versions -- a feature named 'asynchronous solution load'. You're able to open a file and start editing while the X hundreds of projects load. However if you do a Navigate To, Find In Files, etc. among other operations, you'll get the modal progress bar because those operations require having the entire solution parsed. But editing and other simple operations are available while the projects are loading (which takes up the bulk of the time).

edit: more info about asynchronous solution load: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/visualstudio/2013/10/14/asynchronous-solution-load-performance-improvements-in-visual-studio-2013/

Announcing .NET Core RC2 and .NET Core SDK Preview 1
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dotnet/2016/05/16/announcing-net-core-rc2/

Announcing ASP.NET Core RC2
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/webdev/2016/05/16/announcing-asp-net-core-rc2/

Announcing Updated Web Development Tools for ASP.NET Core RC2
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/visualstudio/2016/05/16/announcing-updated-web-development-tools-for-asp-net-core-rc2/

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.NET Core RC2 is supported on the following platforms:

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.2

Centos 7.1

Debian 8.2 (8.2, 8.3, 8.4)+

Ubuntu 14.04 (16.04 support is coming at RTM)

OS X 10.11

Windows 7+ / Server 2012 R2+

Windows Nano Server TP5

I thought it was the other way around? C# on the outside, legacy code connected on the inside? Anyways, I found that confusing. For the rest, visual studio most definitely uses WPF for much of the UI but also the chrome (e.g. see https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/75322/which-language-was-used-to-create-visual-studio-2010 and https://www.quora.com/As-of-2015-how-much-of-Microsoft-Visual-Studio-is-written-in-managed-code and https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/visualstudio/2010/02/16/wpf-in-visual-studio-2010-part-1-introduction/).