Microsoft Visual Studio 2015 Supports Targeting Linux

[nanonyme]

Are you an expert in both?

I'm only speaking for myself here. I used to work at a tiny company and we had some Windows Servers. I complained to a friend in the technology industry over all of the headaches I had maintaining their configurations, coordinating security update times so that they didn't affect employees or customers, and managing user accounts and so forth. And worst of all was manually managing our install licenses and tracking the documentation involved. Managing our Linux machines was much easier, I could accomplish everything I needed from one machine with ssh and whenever I screwed up I could do a fresh install. He laughed at me, because he was at a larger firm managing hundreds of Windows machines using automated tools with remote unmanaged software installs, remote scheduled restarts, and so forth and they had a site license for Windows and Office that made license management easy.

My point is, I wonder if managing a Windows server build farm is always a headache, or if there are tools available to make it child's play as long as you have money to burn.

Yes. Windows requires a lot more boilerplate than Linux to get it the point where you can bootstrap your build system from vanilla templates. I deal with both for work. Bundled SSH daemon is just something you can't easily beat. I've been confused for the past decade on why MS still hasn't written their own SSH daemon and bundled it in the server versions. This is such a big deal that I know of build servers that have SSHd running on cygwin just to have a reasonable and secure remote control mechanism

[vortex]

As UE4 C++ Programmer I have to say VS is the worst IDE in the world. Slower and more annoying than even Eclipse.

Lol... yeah right.
Everyone I know in the industry that uses it loves it.

While I don't really care about compiler support that much, what I do care about is the debugging ability that VS offers. That is, bar none, the best debugger.
If that is part of this, then, it is big news.

[Passso]

Managing our Linux machines was much easier, I could accomplish everything I needed from one machine with ssh and whenever I screwed up I could do a fresh install. He laughed at me, because he was at a larger firm managing hundreds of Windows machines using automated tools with remote unmanaged software installs, remote scheduled restarts, and so forth and they had a site license for Windows and Office that made license management easy.

My point is, I wonder if managing a Windows server build farm is always a headache, or if there are tools available to make it child's play as long as you have money to burn.

I do manage Windows domain for years and your friend is right. Microsoft provide free (0$) tools to manage small/mid/huge domains with few clicks.
Little of them are included in Windows Server itself so they are unknow by public.

I manage some Linux servers too and there are not such tools, so you really need to spend more time per machine on average.

Here I am talking about small/mid size business networks (50 to 200 machines), for my personal I prefer a good Opensuse : simple and effective

Bundled SSH daemon is just something you can't easily beat.

Yes I miss that a lot too! But since you manage on higher level or with a graphical tool it is not a problem generally.

[edoantonioco]

Even if Visual Studio its a very slow IDE, to have it on Linux would be great, right now monodevelop work good for .NET development on Linux (for not WF stuff, like web applications), so to open .sln files created on VS on monodevelop works, sadly their .NET implementation its not complete, as some windows forms are not implemented yet. So to have Microsoft working on it would be just great. Even if they wont port VS to Linux, they seems to want to make an export option to Linux, what means than they would polish the current Linux .NET implementation, so to develop .NET apps on Linux using monodevelop would become a lot better.

[ceztko]

As UE4 C++ Programmer I have to say VS is the worst IDE in the world. Slower and more annoying than even Eclipse.

Have you used VS recently? VS2013 is by far the best VS release ever. It won't work fast with old machines, but you have extremely good C++ online syntax checking and autocomplete.

[eydee]

It will be interesting if one day Microsoft were to bring Visual Studio itself to Linux...

Not in this century. It's built on WFP and it's unlikely that they'd completely rewrite it from scratch.

[Nille]

Bundled SSH daemon is just something you can't easily beat.

Why do you not use the remote PowerShell?

[eydee]

As UE4 C++ Programmer I have to say VS is the worst IDE in the world. Slower and more annoying than even Eclipse.

The last one you used was 6.0, wasn't it...

[bnolsen]

Lol... yeah right.
Everyone I know in the industry that uses it loves it.

While I don't really care about compiler support that much, what I do care about is the debugging ability that VS offers. That is, bar none, the best debugger.
If that is part of this, then, it is big news.

Learn to use unit tests and simulations. Debuggers are pretty lame when it comes to heavy threading.

Everything I do is always compiled release mode.
At least on linux I can selectively compile specific object files in debug mode when I really have to.
And thankfully I've been able to recreate any threading related crashes on both windows and linux, the only expection to that being the platform specific thread and process management pieces I've cooked up which were very manageable using....simulation!

I think its been at least 4 years since the last time I actually did breakpoints and instruction stepping. Typically I try to force core dumps through unit test/simulation and then use a debugger to inspect state, although many times I prefer tossing in prints to do the same.

Then I can actually add the test/simulation to my battery of tests.

[wargames]

Maybe they are afraid of CLion?