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Visual C++ 2010, why the hate?

On the 5th of December, the Visual C++ team put a video on their blog about the future of Visual C++. You can watch it here but it is rather boring if you ask me: (link).

It gathered a lot of comments complaining about how bad Visual C++ 2010 was, and the very next day InfoQ made a summary here: (link). This summary got some more negative comments (and a bit of support too).

Today, the InfoQ article was posted to reddit, and now the complaints are continuing there: (link).

Now I have to disagree. I am not contesting the issues raised, but for what I use it for I think this latest version is really nice. So here is my take on the subject.

I am using Visual C++ 2010 Express for teaching the C++ language in a video games school, and both as a Windows compiler and as a fronted to the PSP compiler and debugger. I choose to use this version because Intellisense was working just fine out of the box (I had to rely on Visual Assist with the previous versions), because it also has this kind of continuous compilation that underlines syntax errors as you type, and because it provides better error messages than before. It also still has its wonderful integrated debugger, the whole thing is completely free, and they got rid of the SxS… What else could I ask for?

But I am not doing any WTL, MFC or CLI stuff, which seem to be what the complaints are mostly targeted at. The F1 key is also working fine on my native C++ code, and the IDE is responsive even if I am running a computer that was already low end years ago. So I have basically never encountered any of the complaints I have read on the pages linked above.

If I had to complain about something I would say that the new WPF interface still has some wet paint here and there, I hate the dark blue border around the IDE and sometimes windows don’t get redrawn when they should. But anyway that’s just the IDE and not the compiler, I am not sure the Visual C++ team has much to do with it, and it’s good to see Microsoft using their own brand new technology on one of their flagship products.

Got some experiences to share? The comments are here below.