Hello, I was looking at purchasing Visual Studio .Net from Microsoft, and I was wondering if anyone has had the chance to use it. If so, would you suggest I buy it. I currently already know Visual Basic and I want to learn C++. I was hoping this would be the all in one IDE I was looking for. Any thoughts would be helpful. ~Tim

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I am currently using Visual Studio .net. It works well for me and I like using it. If you are wanting a single IDE that you can use for both visual basic and C++, VS .net is the only one I can think of right now. I'm sure there are others out there if you search, but I don't know how good they are. So I would say if you have the money to spend on VS .net then go for it.

Now, if you just want an IDE for C++ I would suggust trying Dev-C++, which is free.

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I highly recommend it, but of course my company bought it for me.

There are some big changes from the older C++ and especially VB. The biggest is the move to managed code. I have done quite a bit of C++ programming but I haven't made the jump to c# yet. What I have done is VB. VB.NET is a completely new language, and that's a good thing. I have found that you can do 98.5% of what you can do in C or C# in VB.NET. The down side is that VB 6 is not compatible with .NET. You might have to rewrite some of your code. Again I say that this is not necessarly bad because I believe VB.NET is MUCH better than 6.

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Thank You,

I have taken your suggestions into great consideration and have purchased my own copy. It should arrive any day! I can't wait to get cracking on some new algorithms!!!

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I see he has already bought the thing, but my opinion might be worthwhile for someone reading this topic later. I have both MS Visual Studio and Borland Builder 6. I was previously using a Borland Builder C++ platform, and although I was comforatable with it, I was fighting against limitations. I wanted to try Direct X so I thought that the Visual Studio would be the best so I bought it. At the time I was quite disappointed, not because it was bad but because it was not what I expected. It promises 3 languages VB, C++ and C# and they are there. But what I did not see was visual C++. Blinded with fury I took it back the store, but they would not let me return it. So it sat on my shelf and I bought Borland Builder 6. And so I was happy with that for a while. But limitations were still there. Then I realized that the real limitations were in my own head. That's when I started learning OpenGL and Win32. These brought me past the limitations and made me realize that the choice between these two programming environments was largely irrelevant.

Since then I have spent time learning the features of Visual Studio and the languages of VB and C# as well as Direct X 9. Now I would have to reccomend for no other reason than it is good to be able to use it, because it dominates the industry. I must confess that I still use Borland however, because that is where my main project is and converting it over to Visual Studio would require writing my own version of a few Borland Classes that I use extensively.

 

 

 

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i don't know if everybody knows this, but linux users can go for "mono". it's an ide for csharp development. there's a c# runtime too. most of the things are supported, except for forms, but that is coming up in the near future.

vs.net... it's quite expensive (except when you can get it with a student license), but it's a good program. the entire .net platform is really good i think. big up for microsoft! (for once )

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NO! Do not buy it. You can just get it free and legal from Microsoft's website. The are giving out Visual Studio 2005 for free. Of course it is just a beta, but it is free and basically complete!

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Yes that's right! You can get the MS Visual Studio 2005 BETA version here:
http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/vs2005/get/

And there's several copies of the 2001/2002 Visual Studio.NET BETA floating around for almost nothing at ebay. (6 CD's)

GreetingZ

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Buying Visual Studio .NET seems silly when you can program in .NET and use all its amazing features and all of the documentation for free, and if you want an IDE SharpDevelop is great (just google it or something) and it's freeware, lightweight and open source so yayy :-)

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Although Visual Studio.net is a great IDE but it is not compulsory to use it for developing .net applications.
ASP.net applications can also be developed in notepad itself. But if anyone want to use any IDE than Webmatrix is also a good tool and it is free.
There are a lot IDE's available for C++ and I am sure that VS.net is not the best for this. They would be a lot better and cheap alternatives.
Offcourse I am using VS.net because it is given us by our company in my office but I would not buy it personally because alternatives are available.

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