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Conclusion
As
you've just seen - Visual Studio.Net is a mammoth
piece of software, but is it really what you need/want?
Hopefully
there is enough information on these 6 pages for
you to decide (everyone wants different things
anyway!). However, with respect to game development/multimedia
programming (and particularly VB development),
I think the answer is not yet.
I
have great pain in coming to that conclusion -
everything except for the 3 points raised in the
Real World page is excellent. The IDE is
excellent and is well worth the upgrade; the new
language changes are difficult to get used too
- but are so powerful it just elevates the language's
capabilities to a new level. The .Net frameworks
are a very powerful system - albeit only a fraction
of it is useful to the multimedia orientated programmer.
If only there weren't problems with DirectX and
the performance overheads.
The
DirectX situation shouldn't be a long term issue
- the official word is that DirectX9 will be fully
.Net compatable; which (at time of writing) just
means a 6 month wait (assuming you dont mind using
DX9!).
As
for the performance drop - As I stated at the
time, I will be happy to hold up my hand and admit
my fault should my values be proven to
be wrong - I still find it surprising that I got
those results, and would quite like to be proven
wrong! .Net isn't universally slower than the
previous versions, as I have found a few cases
where it is a bit faster, but that doesn't hold
much in it.
Given
the considerable leap that Microsoft have made
with the .Net strategy, I would not be surprised
if there was a considerable level of support in
the form of patches, components, upgrades etc...
maybe even at some point a JIT compiler designed
to generate faster code quicker. So for now, I
think that unless you have seen something in this
review that really grabs you and requires you
buy the software, that you wait. Hopefully over
time the system will mature a bit, and prove to
be more useful to our cause. I really want to
use some of the new language improvements in VB.Net,
but right now the performance hit doesn't make
it worth the time...
•
Introduction:
Introducing the software, and the aims of this
review.
• Getting
Started With Visual Studio .Net:
The installer, version, prices etc...
• The new
IDE: New things in
the Integrated Development Environment, and is
it an improvement?
• Learning
to Talk the Talk:
Learning the new language (C#) and the changes
to Visual Basic
• Visual
Studio .Net in the Real World:
Performance and real world capabilities
• Conclusion: Summing
everything up in a neat way
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