The international manufacturing company that I am working for is considering moving from Windows to Linux. The only reason for this that I am aware of is that the Windows automatic updates occassionaly cause some of their applications to fail. Apparently, they do not know how to turn this off. What other reasons they may have, I do not know (cost, the mobile phone effect?). My question is does Linux or some popular variant of Linux have a development environment equivalent in power and functionality to Microsoft .Net other than what Java offers, the Linux version of .Net (Mono) offers, or running Windows as a virtual machine on Linux?
It's kind of unclear what you are looking for... a Mono IDE that runs on Linux?
Have you looked at http://monodevelop.com/ ? It's not Visual Studio, but it's really not bad as IDE's go, and I think it's cross-compatible with VS project files. Should be packages available for any major Linux distro -- I know all the Debian based ones have it.
Mono's API is pretty compatible with .NET, though there are differences in some of the supporting libraries. There are apache extensions to do ASP.NET, but they are fiddly to get set up correctly.
It's a usable platform though, and it's possible to write Mono code that's 100% .NET compatible if you stay away from certain assemblies that haven't been ported yet.
I know I am 9 months late. You may have found your solution. You may look at IronPython.
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To what extent is it possible and legal to developer WinRT applications with VS2010 Pro?
On the one side, I think it should be perfectly possible and legal to create an HTML5/CSS/JavaScript WinRT App with VS2010 Pro since you can probably do so using Win 8 Notepad. On the other side, I think it might be difficult and possibly illegal to create an C# WinRT App via VS2010 Pro since doing so might require the user to circumvent intentional limitations of the VS2010 Pro software.
In the old days, the user just bought a stand alone compiler and she/he was free to link it against whatever libraries she/he choose. In this way, she/he didn't have to upgrade her/his compiler anytime she wanted a newer version of MFC or *.NET. These days, the IDE seems to be married to the compiler so I'm not sure if the user is allowed to use older IDEs (such as VS2010) to link against newer libraries like those offered in WinRT
See here.
You can use the Windows SDK, along with your chosen development
environment, to write Windows Store apps (only on Windows 8)...
So it's clearly legal. I haven't tested it, but I'm going to guess that you can probably do the code side of things in VS 2010, but VS 2010 isn't setup to do Windows Store UI so xaml, html5 etc probably won't work.
It's probably much easier to simply use Visual Studio 2012 express.
To what extent is it possible and legal to developer WinRT applications with VS2010 Pro?
It is not (directly). The APIs and the packaging tools will not be available in VS 2010.
While you could potentially do this yourself, it seems far simpler to just install Visual Studio 2012 Express for Windows 8 and use it.
These days, the IDE seems to be married to the compiler so I'm not sure if the user is allowed to use older IDEs (such as VS2010) to link against newer libraries like those offered in WinRT
It's more than just newer libraries - there's an entire new runtime, and the language needed changing in order to work with it.
Considering to develop a desktop application with Qt for Windows. It will be a free download application, but for a commecial SERVICE. (need an account with our commercial service to work).
I think we could use the Qt for Windows from Nokia (LGLP version) because its free app. But the lastest one version of Qt needs a C++ complier from Microsoft.
Which one?
Do I need to pay for an C++ compiler from Microsoft, or do they have a free version to use with Qt?
Reading info docs, googling and we still cann't understand what tools do I need.
If you want to use the Visual Studio compilers, you can download the free Windows SDK. The following link takes you to the SDK for Visual Studio 2008:
Microsoft Windows SDK for Windows 7 and .NET Framework 3.5 SP1
This includes all the C++ compilers and tools you need. (There is a more recent version available, but Visual Studio 2010 is not yet a "level 1 supported" platform for Qt.) We are using this on standalone build machines and it works fine.
Just a personal opinion, but we have found that using anything other than MSVC on Windows (for example, MinGW) causes a lot of problems. It is not that the other toolchains are bad, it is just that they are all treated as second-class citizens. We had lots of problems with third-party libraries not being able to build in MinGW or having nonexistent build instructions and having to do a lot of manual Makefile editing, etc. You are much more likely to have things "just work" if using MSVC.
For the most part (static linking), you cannot mix and match. You need to pick one toolchain and stick with it. If I were starting from scratch, I'd definitely go with MSVC.
Just our experience (we started with MinGW); your mileage may vary.
No, you do not need to pay for anything.
The Microsoft toolchain is available for free as part of the Microsoft Windows Software Development Kit.
Additionally, the following article may also be of interest to you:
Developing Windows Applications in C++: The tools you need
The alternative supported by Qt is MinGW. The runtime libraries are free from copyright, so you can do whatever you want with them.
It is basically the Windows counterpart of the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) under Unix.
I want to trial Windows 7 but wondered if anyone who has done so already ran into any issues specifically related to development?
i.e. problems with VS2008, SQL Management Studio and SQL Server, MySQL, PHP etc. etc.
Examples from XP -> Vista: in Vista there was a sudden loss of an SMTP server. And there were initially (if I remember correctly) issues with VS2005 with I seem to remember a patch coming out later to remedy.
EDIT: or on the contrary any big advantages or benefits to developing on Windows 7!
I been using windows 7 for a while now.
I been using VS2008, netbeans, tomcat, sql manager studio, mysql etc...
And i actually find it more stable and faster then windows vista.
There aren't many advantages to developing on Windows 7 before it's released. Most development features are a function of the IDE, not the OS. So, you might want to consider instead if you should be developing on Visual Studio 2010 instead of VS2008. Instead, you're more likely to have compatibility issues, although for the most part, Windows 7 is much more compatible with existing software than Vista was when it was in beta.
There could be one advantage to developing for Windows 7 before it's released -- you have a head start in taking advantage of features that competitors haven't yet, giving you an advantage in the market. That's the theory at least. That assumes you're going to develop something that uses a feature only available in Windows 7. That assumes you wouldn't be better off with the larger number of sales you'd get by developing something that works on existing platforms.
The only issue I've encountered so far involves compiling older vanilla C programs with Visual C++. You're usually presented with an error like so:
mt.exe : general error c101008d:
Failed to write the updated manifest
to the resource of file
".\Release\SomeProgram.exe". The
binary is not a valid Windows image.
You have to add an empty resource file to the solution.
More on the issue here.
I've never gotten any of the new audio stack examples working; thus this question. API works, documentation is... a bit lacking at the moment; sure to be fixed by RTM.
Other than that, Windows 7 has been faster than and just as stable as Vista (2 crashes from RTM, 0 crashes after SP1) was for me. Truly, you should be developing on Vista and testing on Windows 7 RC as a general practice with respect to pre-release operating systems; but I think we'll get away with it just fine in this particular case.
My advice would be to not develop on Windows 7. Note that I don't mean you shouldn't target it as a platform, just that you should be doing your development on a stable platform.
I personally won't trust a new release of Windows (or Linux for that matter) until it's been in the wild as a proper product (not release candidate) for many months. For Windows, I tend to wait until the first real service pack plus a month for all the nigglies to be fixed.
For Linux, I'm still using Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, not 8.1, and certainly not the 9 alphas.
Test machines are another matter, you should always have one at the "latest and greatest" level for testing, but I consider the development machine of prime importance, needing a stable platform.
No problems from my end yet, been working on a c# app with visual studio 2008 x64, and php web apps with dreamweaver cs3 and netbeans.
Windows7 seems to be just vista with more bells and wistles and a bit more responsive, not to sure if to much really change "under the hood" so to speak. But I have nothing to back that statement up with...
I've been using Win7 for a couple of months now and never had a problem. I went straight from XP to 7 and the only problems I faced were related to configuring SourceGear Vault to work with IIS7...other than that,it's been all good.
I use VS 2005, VS 2008, SQL Server 2005, Infragistics NetAdvantage, and a couple of third party components.
Although I haven't seen any advantages for the development side of the applications, I'd recommend you to upgrade to Win7 only for the better feel of a complete OS. I mean XP was good, but I really dig Win7.
We're looking at upgrading from Visual Studio 2005 to Visual Studio 2008. I discovered the following disturbing comment.
From Update WINVER and _WIN32_WINNT:
Beginning with Visual C++ 2008, Visual C++ does not support targeting Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows ME, or Windows NT.
Does this mean that if we rebuild our products with Microsoft Visual C++ 2008, they will stop working on Windows 98 machines? It sounds like it, but I have trouble believing they'd make that big a change.
It's not just about .NET 3.5. It's about the Windows SDK header file macros and definitions pulled in by the mandatory version bump in WINVER. So yes, Colen, Visual C++ 2008 binaries will target the Windows NT APIs only and while occasionally they may work on Windows 98, you should assume that you cannot use Visual Studio 2008 to target Win9x. You will have to use Visual Studio 2005 or older.
Yes, it does mean that: The Windows CreateProcess and LoadLibrary APIs on Windows NT before Windows 2000 and all of Windows (95, 98, and ME) will not load a DLL or EXE file made by Visual Studio 2008 (VS 9), because the PE header in the file has the required OS version field set to 5.
The error message upon attempting to load a Visual Studio 2008-generated EXE file will (be a very unfriendly modal error dialog) actually say "You need to upgrade your operating system to run this program".
I experimented with editing the field to 4. The binary will be loaded, but any use of the Visual Studio 2008 C-runtime will hang or crash the process. There are ways to get Visual Studio 2008 projects to not use their native C-runtimes, but if massive use of C++ features is important to you, this approach is not going to scale past a small application.
Visual Studio 2005 (VS 8) has most of the features of Visual Studio 2008, but it still targets early OS versions which is why at my shop we are sticking with that for the moment.
It's natural that they do not support older versions of their operating system on their newer products. It would cost them more (not just monetary cost, but also making harder or impossible to provide some newer useful features) to make things work with the limitations (and often bugs) of older systems. This happens all the time, and with everyone; new versions of GCC drop support for older less popular architectures; new releases of glibc require a more recent minimum kernel version; and so on.
These operating systems have long been retired; from Microsoft's point of view, nobody should be using them anymore. If you still want to develop for them, you can use older tools of the same vintage.
The 3.5 Framework won't even install on Windows 2000 Server at this point. So I don't believe that they will on 95, 98, or NT either. Microsoft doesn't want the responsibility of supporting these retired operating systems anymore.
It is my understanding that with the most recent KernelEx all MSVC versions targeting XP could potentially work (results depending on how many "newest" functions/features you will then decide to use)
With respect to what the answer could have been in 2008 instead, there were quite a number of patched libraries even back then (check links on the Wayback Machine if they are broken).
While I agree with JesperE, Windows 98 is such a small percentage of users that it makes little sense to target them, unless of course you know a large percentage of your customers are in fact using Windows 98.
In any case, you can in fact target Windows 98 in Visual Studio 2008 (you can't develop on Windows 98). You must, however, target your projects at .NET 2.0 only, you cannot use any 3.0, or 3.5 features.
I'd recommend that you take this as an opportunity to stop supporting Windows 9x. This is a good reason as any to do so. And, at least if you're writing C/C++ code for the Win32 API, life is much easier if you can assume that the target OS is Windows 2000 or later.
According to .NET 3.5 information, Windows 98 is not supported by .NET 3.5, so I would imagine that is what they mean. You can still do .NET 2.0 and lower development, but if you use the 3.5 libraries, Windows 98 is not supported.
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I started trying to play with Mono, mostly for fun at the moment. I first tried to use the Visual Studio plugin that will convert a csproj into a makefile, but there seemed to be no version available for Visual Studio 2005. I also read about the MonoDevelop IDE, which sounded nice. Unfortunately, there's no pre-fab Windows package for it. I tried to follow some instructions to build it by combining dependencies from other semi-related installs. It didn't work, but that's probably because I'm a Windows-oriented guy and can barely spell "makefile".
So, my question is this: What's the lowest-energy way to get up and running to try some Mono-based development on Windows?
I'd recommend getting VMWare Player and using the free Mono development platform image that is provided on the website.
Download Mono
Setup time for this will be minimal, and it will also allow you to get your code working in .NET and then focus on porting issues without a massive hassle of switching machines and the like. the VMWare Player tools will allow you to simply drag and drop the files over to copy them.
I'm looking to take a couple of my .NET apps and make them Mono compliant, and this is the path I'm going to take here shortly.
A year later and the answer to this has change greatly. You can now use MonoDevelop on Windows, or if you are more comfortable in Visual Studio you can use the Visual Studio Tools to write everything and then debug on in VM to make sure it is working on Linux.
#Chris I have found that Visual Studio is the best IDE for developing against .NET -- I think the best way to target Mono is really just to develop and build in Visual Studio under Windows then just run those binaries directly on Linux (or whatever other Mono platform you are using). There are free versions of Visual Studio if licensing is a concern. If you are developing under Linux, the best software is probably Eclipse with a Mono plugin (see The Mono Handbook - Eclipse for installation instructions) but keep in mind it doesn't have near the amount of features or language integration Visual Studio has.
#modesty Mono is a 3rd party open source implementation of the .NET framework which allows you to run .NET applications on platforms other than Windows.
One of the best things you can do if developing with Visual Studio for Mono is to get MoMA http://www.mono-project.com/MoMA. This will inspect any number of assemblies that you build and generate a report showing potential Mono problems (e.g., methods not implemented in the mono library). It can be run from a GUI or the command line for use in automated builds.
Miguel had a post about debugging Mono running on linux with remote debugging on Visual Studio. This may be something you want to look into... Using Visual Studio to debug Mono. There is also a new project called CloverLeaf whose goal is enabling debugging Mono on Windows in Visual Studio.
There's just no reason to build your app using Mono; the whole point of the .Net CLR is that the compiled output is cross-platform.
So you can simply build it using your favourite IDE (and if you like IDEs, Microsoft's is the best one to use) and then test it on Mono. Even if you get Mono working on Windows, it wouldn't be a very good test of your app's portability: what if your app does silly things like assuming filenames have backslashes in them, or that there's something special about a folder called Program Files? The best way to do portability testing is to actually test your app on the target platform.
And that's pretty easy to do with a Linux VMware player like the one at http://www.go-mono.com/mono-downloads/download.html.
Personally, I'm just compiling in Visual Studio 2008 as if it were for .Net 2.0 and then running in Mono (VS2008 on Windows in a VirtualBox, Mono on OSX). All the problems come up at runtime, anyway, so the system works perfectly.
I just found this very new link, which is amazing and shows you how to set up Visual Studio 2008 for Mono.
At the same time, setting up Mono on OpenSuse or Ubuntu inside a VirtualBox (Sun's product) is easy, painless, and doesn't force you to abandon whatever platform you normally live in.
This is not relevant to your question, but I might note that I just got into Mono and I'm amazed at how much of .Net is implemented, including much of the Winforms stuff.
My first instinct would be the rather unhelpful "Install Linux". You are somewhat swimming against the current to try and develop in mono under windows. Installing GTK and everything is a bit of a bother in my experience.
If you do feel like using linux, then you could Try Ubuntu
Otherwise:
There's some information here: http://www.mono-project.com/Mono:Windows and it seems the cygwin toolchain might be your best bet. I don't think you're going to be able to avoid makefiles, sadly. I found a slightly more explicit tutorial from O'Reilly.
#modesty: Mono provides the necessary software to develop and run .NET client and server applications on Linux, Solaris, Mac OS X, Windows, and Unix. Sponsored by Novell (http://www.novell.com), the Mono open source project has an active and enthusiastic contributing community and is positioned to become the leading choice for development of Linux applications. -- From the Mono site.
Eclipse plugin for Mono is dead. On Linux use MonoDevelop or X-Develop if you like good commercial support (although MonoDevelop is closing on them fast feature-wise). On Windows SharpDevelop has custom MSBuild targets for compiling the code against Mono.
As Mono and MonoDevelop are changing fast, be sure to use the latest released versions, even if they are not marked as stable yet (e.g. versions shipped with stock Ubuntu are terribly outdated).
The VMWare image is a great way to start testing Windows-developed code on Linux. Don't touch cygwin unless you are already very conformable with it.
I liked the idea of trying to use MonoDevelop mostly just to make sure my stuff would work against the Mono runtimes. I guess it would also be possible to get crazy with msbuild and write some custom targets that tried to build against Mono, but that's basically emulating the now-defunct plug-in's functionality which I assume was non-trivial to build. I do have minor experience with cygwin, and I am happy typing "configure" and "make" all day long, but when a problem occurs in that process, I'm virtually screwed. I'll probably try to play with all this again, but if it takes me more than a couple hours to come up with a way to build comfortably against the Mono runtimes, I'll probably just bail.
I will try the Eclipse idea. I use that for Java, so I might be able to get the c# stuff to work. We shall see...