[JorgeA]

CoffeeFiend, on 06 March 2012 - 08:45 PM, said:

reset is mostly sending the wrong message (our OS needs reinstalls so often that we built that in!) while not being really helpful

The biggest drawbacks of the existing OS recovery options are (1) you lose your installed programs, and (2) the process of reinstalling the OS and programs, which -- depending on the kind of user involved -- can prove to be a process which is overwhelming, tedious, intimidating, and/or frightening. The ideal method would be to enable a reset/refresh/reinstall/whatchamacallit that allows the user both to keep their data and all settings, and to choose which of their applications to keep intact, with the proviso that the more programs you keep installed, the less good that the "refresh" will do.

Don't know if this is technically feasible, but it would be my ideal. It might be called "Windows In-Place Easy Transfer."

Another possible (and not necessarily too complicated) idea would be to automatically pop up an option, right before or right after the installation of a program, to image the HDD as it is at that moment, with sufficiently detailed instructions for the less technically inclined. (Restore points often don't successfully "take" when applied IMX.)

--JorgeA

[JorgeA]

MagicAndre1981, on 06 March 2012 - 01:14 PM, said:

the program displays a Metro-Style App

Start8_.png

I don't like it

Yeah, it's not the optimal solution. As it turns out, apparently what it does is to create a miniature version of the Start Screen, without actually working much better.

But I'm glad to know that various people are busy trying to fix what's broken in Windows 8. With any luck, one or more of them will get it right.

--JorgeA

[CoffeeFiend]

JorgeA, on 06 March 2012 - 10:05 PM, said:

The biggest drawbacks of the existing OS recovery options are (1) you lose your installed programs, and (2) the process of reinstalling the OS and programs

Yes. It'll save you about 10 minutes compared to installing from a flash drive or such. But then, all the updates, all the optional updates, all the drivers for everything, all your software, all the patches and updates for all your software, etc. Printer preferences, pinning apps, browser extensions, codecs, licenses and activations, etc. That's a whole day gone by.Then you start setting all your preferences and general settings in all apps and so on.

Now, if you're a power user or programmer, this is *so* much worse (being both is even worse). Several IDEs and compilers (Visual Studio, SQL Server, service packs for both, Windows SDK, sample DBs for SQL Server, AVR Studio 5 -- oops gotta reinstall VS2010 SP1 again now, Eclipse, CodeWarrior, Imagecraft, Keil, eabi toolchain + CMSIS, etc). Now configure VS and others to your needs. Reinstall Resharper/VisualAssistX/CodeRush or whatever you use, SVN/Hg/Git/whatever tools (cmd line/shell GUIs/multiple IDE integration) and their "ignore" files and various settings, various VS extensions via NuGet, VMWare Workstation and several virtual machine images for testing (also, the vSphere 5 client), several JTAG/BDM-related tools and drivers for embedded folks, IDA Pro, etc. There goes yet another day.

God forbid you also use other kinds of software! Now my color profiles and prefs, my custom photoshop workspaces (and tons of other settings/presets), bridge settings, my custom pre-flight settings in acrobat, font sets in suitcase fusion, brush settings in Painter, outlook signatures, your company's templates for various CAD apps, and countless other things in numerous other apps (e.g. telling wireshark not to go crazy because of TCP checksums, extra folders in CCleaner, internal codec settings in MPC-HC, Intuos tablet settings, fixing errors in WMP's library, etc). That's assuming that nothing goes wrong on anything, not that it's uncommon for a Windows security update to fail or something along those lines. Some people would even add some games to this list.

I think you now understand why I never want to reinstall unless absolutely necessary. I just don't have that kind of time to waste. Installing Windows itself isn't the issue, it's everything else you have to do after that is. It's so much work that I used to make images of it with TrueImage but by the time I end up needing to restore them almost everything included is out of date so that is typically no help (I'd just have to uninstall everything and reinstall the new versions)

But yeah. I can now save myself a whole 10 minutes in this 3 day long ordeal! I feel so relieved.

[Aloha]

MagicAndre1981, on 06 March 2012 - 08:17 AM, said:

this is the same like in IWndows 7. Open it and change the version number MinClient from 8220 to 8102, create a new ISO and run setup

Thank you.

Umm... I'm afraid of using the Search on the Start Screen (well, I won't call it Metro Start any more!) It's OK if there are some results after I hit Search. But if it doesn't find anything, I can't return to the desktop screen at all. Then the only way to get rid of Start Screen is to sign out and then sign in again!

[JorgeA]

Aloha, on 07 March 2012 - 12:30 AM, said:

Umm... I'm afraid of using the Search on the Start Screen (well, I won't call it Metro Start any more!) It's OK if there are some results after I hit Search. But if it doesn't find anything, I can't return to the desktop screen at all. Then the only way to get rid of Start Screen is to sign out and then sign in again!

Aloha,

In that case (when Search doesn't find anything), what happens if you hit the Windows key, or if you hover the mouse to the lower-left corner of the screen?

--JorgeA

This post has been edited by JorgeA: 07 March 2012 - 02:12 AM

[JorgeA]

CoffeeFiend, on 06 March 2012 - 07:52 PM, said:

Meanwhile, yet another good read: That Windows 8 experience? Confusing. Confusing as hell

CoffeeFiend,

Very good article, thanks. He puts another nail in the coffin of the idea of Windows tablets selling to businesses.

I also like this remark in the comments section:

Quote

Is Microsoft ever going to hire people with field experience in HCI rather hiring a bunch of acedemics?

--JorgeA

[Aloha]

JorgeA, on 07 March 2012 - 01:58 AM, said:

Aloha,

In that case (when Search doesn't find anything), what happens if you hit the Windows key, or if you hover the mouse to the lower-left corner of the screen?

--JorgeA

I tried pressing Windows key, and even clicking on the lower-left corner, it just toggled between the Search Screen and the Start Screen. Then if I clicked on the Desktop tile, the screen flicked and nothing happened, I was still at the Start screen. I hope you are not confused with my description!

[JorgeA]

Aloha, on 07 March 2012 - 09:44 PM, said:

JorgeA, on 07 March 2012 - 01:58 AM, said:

Aloha,

In that case (when Search doesn't find anything), what happens if you hit the Windows key, or if you hover the mouse to the lower-left corner of the screen?

--JorgeA

I tried pressing Windows key, and even clicking on the lower-left corner, it just toggled between the Search Screen and the Start Screen. Then if I clicked on the Desktop tile, the screen flicked and nothing happened, I was still at the Start screen. I hope you are not confused with my description!

Aloha,

Wow, I had to think about that for a while!

That's very strange behavior, not at all what I would expect to happen. I'll try searching for a string that I know doesn't exist, and see what happens.

Just tried it in the Developer Preview, where that PC is in now. I went into the Start Screen and typed "ghjkl". It didn't find anything, but it did let me get back to the Start Screen and then to the Desktop when I clicked on that tile.

Next time I boot into the CP (it's getting late), I'll try the same thing there and report back.

--JorgeA

[MagicAndre1981]

MS listens a bit. Now the color is back in the VS11 RC:



They also removed the caps in the test like "Solution Explorer". But now the Mainmenu items are all in Caps like "FILE", "EDIT". This looks so ugly gain But it's getting a bit better.

http://blogs.msdn.co...ming-in-rc.aspx

[CoffeeFiend]

It looks less bad now. The beta UI was horrible, now it's just somewhat worse than VS 2010.

But then again, they're only addressing minor issues. It still has far more important problems, like compiling code that doesn't run on half the computers that have Windows as their OS (compiled apps don't work on XP and prior, and as much as I dislike XP we simply can't abandon half of our users yet!) and pretty much not offering a single reason to upgrade in the first place.

C# has pretty much zero improvements besides the very minor async language feature. And I must be thick, because at that price (CDN$15,939 which is USD $15,926 at the current exchange rate) for Ultimate with MSDN I'd expect C++11 support at least equal to freeware (open source) GCC. Also, the free Express editions are now absolutely worthless (you'll need to buy VS to make any simple Windows application in C# or VB)

How about making Visual Studio good enough not to require Resharper/CodeRush/Refactor Pro!/Visual Assist X (much improved refactoring and code navigation for starters), adding a LINQPad-like tool (debugging LINQ queries would be fantastic too), improving CPU & memory profiling (like ANTS), including nice language improvements (supporting more C++11 features, or things like XML literals in C#), including something like Roslyn and its REPL, ideally including a tool like Reflector/dotPeek/ILSpy/JustDecompile, having some out-of-the-box SVN/Hg/Git support (because no, we're not going to suddenly start using TFS -- it's simply not the kind of tool most of us need or want), substantially improved SQL Server support for tasks like database versioning/schema comparison/script generation and such (intellisense in SQL Server Management Studio without SQL Complete would be nice too) much like Redgate's tools provide, maybe making their testing tools as good as freeware alternatives (e.g. NUnit with TestDriven.NET and NCrunch, or even Resharper's test runner), including a basic regex tool (doesn't have to be quite as fancy as regex buddy), better code documentation tools (like sandcastle help file builder), more advanced/improved/highly polished controls (like those from Telerik, DevExpress, Infragistics and others), or even C99 support more than a decade late (yes, I do know it'll never happen), etc.

There's a VERY long list of things that still very much need improving and that most developers would agree on (so we rely on a lot of 3rd party tools for a lot of things). But instead of working on that, we now get a regression on the UI side and supporting less Windows versions as our main new features. Shut up and take my money! No sarcasm at all there No siree! Much like for Win8, they chose to make the UI suck instead of adding new worthwhile features or improving what was already there. Thanks, but no thanks. We'll keep using Win7 & VS 2010. I'd sooner pay again to keep using what we have now than to use the new stuff for free.

[MagicAndre1981]

I like it more compared to the VS2010 UI. I've always applied a theme to get the VS2008 look back. Taste is different.

Maybe you get a feature pack after RTM to compile apps for Windows XP:

Quote

Just so that there is no confusion for the readers of your blog, the issue of XP support for C++ in Dev11 is one we’re taking very seriously, and we’re continuing to take customer feedback on Dev11 beta. However, we are not yet prepared to make an announcement on platform support for the RTM version of Dev11. We will be making an announcement on this in the coming weeks.

http://blog.m-ri.de/...cht-gesprochen/

[CoffeeFiend]

MagicAndre1981, on 09 May 2012 - 11:07 AM, said:

I like it more compared to the VS2010 UI. I've always applied a theme to get the VS2008 look back. Taste is different.

I have no problems with that I don't mind VS2008's interface either. I use VS 2010 mostly for .NET 4 support, and not because I prefer its GUI or theme (the new window manager is nice to have though). So long as it's not the "everything in drab, depressing gray with ALL CAPS EVERYWHERE" I'll be OK.

MagicAndre1981, on 09 May 2012 - 11:07 AM, said:

Maybe you get a feature pack after RTM to compile apps for Windows XP

I didn't think of searching for articles in languages besides English (mainly because I thought pretty much all new infos would be released in English primarily -- I hadn't looked recently either). It's ridiculous not to have XP support in the RTM, but if they bring it back for C++ and also .NET 4.5 apps (which currently don't run on anything older than Win7, but nothing is final yet) then it would make VS 11 a viable option. On the C++ side, benefits are fairly obvious (some C++11 features, which will get used if we can finally target XP) but on the .NET side it's not so clear cut. The nicest thing I've noticed so far (besides async) is that the System.IO.Compression namespace now contains classes to handle zip files natively (instead of having to use SharpZipLib, the J# classes or something similar). I'd still like to see a LOT more improvements but at least it wouldn't be a step back from VS 2010 anymore.

MagicAndre1981, on 09 May 2012 - 11:07 AM, said:

http://blog.m-ri.de/...cht-gesprochen/

Mein Deutsch ist nicht sehr gut (par contre je parle bien français). But it does sound like the odds of getting XP support are pretty good.

[MagicAndre1981]

Now MS announced that there will be an Edition of Visual Express where you can code desktop applications:

http://blogs.msdn.co...ws-desktop.aspx

[MagicAndre1981]

For VS2012 we can now customize the Colors

Visual Studio 2012 Color Theme Editor
http://visualstudiog...a8-337d4e7ace05



F*ck you bastards in VS Design Team !!! Now we need the colored icons back and I'm happy

[MagicAndre1981]

@ CoffeeFiend

the latest CTP of the Update 1 offers XP support:

http://www.microsoft...s.aspx?id=34818

CTP of Windows XP Targeting with C++ in Visual Studio 2012
http://blogs.msdn.co...8/10357555.aspx