Derek said:
VC7 is much better than VC6, both as a compiler and
an editor/IDE. I wouldn't suggest VC6 to anyone now
that 7 is available.
Your statement makes me suspect you've never actually used EITHER of
them.
I see no room for question that VS 7 is dramatically _worse_ than 6.
As a pure editor, they've broken a number of the most fundamental
things (e.g. tagged regular expressions no longer work at all).
Worse, they've rendered many things so difficult that it's just not
worth the trouble. Just for example, consider a scenario that arised
right here on the newsgroups quite regularly: somebody has posted some
code, and I decide to run it through the compiler.
In both cases, I start by copying their code. With VS 6, I click one
button to create a new file, another to save it, and type in a file
name. After than I merely click the "compile" button and then select
"yes" when it asks me if I want to create a default project so it can
be compiled.
With VS 7, there IS no "new file" button for me to click -- I have to
select "File" then "New" and then "File...", and that brings up a
dialog box. In that dialog I have to select "Visual C++" from a list
on the left, and then "C++ Source file" in the box on the right. Now
I (finally!) have a blank file so I can paste in the source code.
Now I want to compile it -- but the "compile" button is greyed out --
I have to make it part of a project before it can be compiled, so I go
back to the beginning and select "New" and "File" and "Project...".
That brings up a dialog again, and I select "Visual C++ Projects" in
the list on the left, and "Win32 console application" from the box on
the right. That brings up (yet another) dialog box in which I have to
select "Project options" on the left, and then click "empty project"
on the right. After that, I select "Project" and then "Add existing
item..." so I can get a dialog that lets me select the file I created
before, and lo and behold, if I've only carried out the previous 50
steps correctly, it _might_ actually let me try to compile the code.
Keep in mind that this is just the set of steps to do something
ridiculously simple! This is something that took a half dozen mouse
clicks in VS 6. Somebody who'd programmed on, e.g. Linux or Sun boxes
previously could independently figure out the entire process in under
10 minutes. With VS 7, it's a whole different story -- I've used
Windows since version 1.0, and MS programming "environments" as old as
ME and PWB. Even with that base of knowledge, it took me close to a
week just to figure out how to get this damnable piece of garbage to
let me compile code of my choice. Even after all that, carrying out
this task that should be utterly trivial is so complex that I needed
to have the environment open for reference while I wrote this just to
be sure I got the sequence of steps reasonably close to correct.
Despite that, it wouldn't surprise me in the least if I've left out a
step or two, meaning even this simple task is even more complex than
I've portrayed it -- it's sufficiently complex that I gave up on it
quite quickly, and on the (now fairly unusual) occassion that I try to
do it, I usually have to make at least two attempts at things before I
get it to work.
Now, considering that it takes all that to do something that used to
be utterly trivial, I leave it to the imagination of those looking on
to figure out how difficult VS7 makes it to actually do something
moderately complex -- but I'll warn them that their estimates are
almost wrong! Everybody I've seen who's taken guesses at what it
takes to do things in VS 7 has been mistaken, and in every case the
job has really been slower, more difficult and more compmlex than
anybody has guessed.
