What reasons to use localized version of Visual Studio 2010? What problems / benefits can you list while using localized versions? Are localized versions really useful?
I can only see problems and very few benefits. Any problems you are likely to experience you will will get them in language other then English, which means searching how to resolve problem in that language is limited on start. Although it may be not directly related but I've been managing servers in polish language for a long time and man I was so many times wishing the errors by polish system was in English. Finding resolution to problems in English is 50x easier then in my native tongue. If you even try to translate error message yourself you will have to be very careful because one translation isn't equal to another, especially when it comes to Microsoft programs (although not only). Many times error in my language given by SharePoint or Windows is so meaningless that you don't even know where to start looking for answers and if you see that error in English you just do "Oh.. it's about this.. simple stuff. Lets fix it".
Back to development.. Visual Studio in English gives you no problems to develop programs for any language you want. And most likely any addons will be in English so you will have mixed environment at some point having one Menu in English and other one in German. Also asking for help and following some tutorials/tips etc will be far easier in English so you won't have to translate stuff On-The-Fly yourself but will just follow the steps.
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I work with French-Canadians on a medium to large Web form app. French is their native language while mine is English. I just wondered what others have done in similar situations. I've search for a Translator Extension that would work in Visual Studio but haven't come up with anything.
Usually I just copy and paste portions into Bing/Google Translate but that makes it pretty tedious.
Here you can find a nice Visual Studio extension for translating source code on fly:
https://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/f2321406-c5bb-42b7-9660-dfacd313eeed
It's not as perfect as it could be (which I imagine could be on fly translation of the whole class/file), but it's far more better than switching between windows and copy-pasting to google translator. By the way - the tool uses Google translate and does it quite effectively.
Actually I'm using App Multilingual Toolkit from Microsoft to manage translations from two different languages. I decided to translate it in Brazilian, so I'd like a friend from Brazil to translate of the strings for me. He hasbn't got any programming knowledge, Visual Studio tools and so on.
The question is how can I export from VS and pass him all the string in a readable format? Something that will be easy for me to import later as well.
I'm not sure of AMT, but I used the gnu text translation toolkit (Windows version), which was very easy to use. You can use a webapp called Pootle that non-technical users can use to provide translated strings.
Users would update the strings via the website, which I could download an updated .po file from, this was then added to my deployment, using a little C# helper that read the strings and displayed the correct version depending on the user's language. It was remarkably easy all round, and as Gettext uses English words as the key, if you add a word that is not translated for a language you will get the English 'default' instead which is better than "error: word not defined" :)
IIRC I got into this because someone on the SVN team enabled the tool as a test, since then they've moved to Transifex - I'm not sure if its significantly better as its a commercial web tool, but it might work for you.
That said, there's also Google translation toolkit - good luck getting to it as its now hidden behind Google's "one account login" guff.
There used to be a utility software, appTranslator (http://www.apptranslator.com/), that helped a lot when trying to translate MFC programs.
It will not only help you translate the strings (STRINGTABLE) but will help you translate dialog content as well (update strings in dialogs, move resources if applicable, ... )
It has not been updated in a couple of years.
(just quickly tried it and it seems to work).
I would say CSV is the most readable way to export/import
I use Visual Studio 2008 and it really makes me crazy how it shows error messages (in Error List window, Output window - especially exceptions) partially in English and partially in my native language. Interestingly, it is worse in WPF than in WinForms project. I've read here that it is about Culture of the running thread (so that the problem is in a settings for .NET).
Why am I solving it? It's simple because if I run into an error message and I don't know what it exactly mean or how to fix the problem then trying to google the problem in any other language than in English is very problematic. For example, it would be useful to set English for debugging purposes.
How to solve the problem?
Thanks for any suggestion!
Have you checked what your VS language settings are & compiler messages are controlled by your OS language settings & what language packs you have installed for the .Net framework...
See this link for some more information.
http://finderr.net/search -- Not entirely an answer but it really helped me a lot.
I mention that i am designing a language. The plan was always to not implement it but to design it but i am considering implementing it if i think i could do it in a reasonable amount of time.
How would i have my language use intellisense in visual studios? BooLangStudio has it http://www.codinginstinct.com/2008/05/boo-in-visual-studio.html, http://www.codeplex.com/BooLangStudio
It all depends on how much time you want to spend on it. I have about 2,000 hours of work in my Visual Studio IntelliSense projects resulting in exactly one mostly-complete language service. That said, it's not your "average" IntelliSense extension to Visual Studio - see the feature set for more info.
Here are some good resources to look at. I have a tendency to write with an assumption that users are already familiar with both the Visual Studio Extensibility basics and parsing with ANTLR. If you aren't, you should probably start at www.antlr.org and with my "ANTLR port" of one of the simple Visual Studio language service tutorials.
Here are some posts showing how serious I am about the subject. :D
How does code completion work?
Smart code-completion original and revisited. Clearly I take the latter more seriously than other people (voted down and voted to close?!), but I believe doing so just gives my users a better product. :)
High-speed incremental lexing for syntax highlighting original (under IScanner-friendly lexers), cleaned up (significantly - vastly preferable to the original), and made yet again 6x faster in 1/4 the memory.
Little things like sane commenting/uncommenting and brace matching do make a difference. On a side note, once you use one that's well-behaved, the others (including the ones for some Microsoft languages in Visual Studio) are rather annoying.
If you can, read all the IntelliSense-related posts on my blog.
Smart indent is a PITA (I mean really smart, e.g. the C# language service in VS2008). I have a love/hate relationship with it. I'm annoyed now because writing this bullet made me think about it. Argh. My insight here makes me a bit forgiving of them breaking it for VS2010 Beta 1, but it doesn't keep me from missing its awesomeness.
PS: I can now build a syntax highlighter for a new language commenting/uncommenting in 1 day. In the same day I'm ofter able to get the type & member bars in as well.
This is a good place to look for Visual Studio Extensibility.
Also, here. But, the first link has a video specific to adding Intellisense to your language service.
As of 4-4-2017: This article seems to give all of the basics for creating a language extension, which includes highlighting words and providing intellisense (code completion).
https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/extensions/example-language-server
I'm a bit in IDE trouble, and I'm not alone I have noticed, still I haven't found an answer on many of my questions.
I would very much stop using different editors and become very good at one (on windows), adhering the pragmatic adage : "Learn one editor (ide) well". I' m willing to put in a lot of effort, to gain on the long term.
I have programmed (java) with Intellij and Eclipse, and am progamming c# now. (VS08 was at first very disappoing for me, till so at SOF mentioned Resharper and now I'm very happy with it, especially since I started writing macros for further adjustments)
For all purpose editors, VIM and EMACS come to mind, but I'm afraid they just cannot compete against VS08/Resharper when it comes to C#, which I'm using a lot on this moment. Further, it isn't clear to me if they support refactoring (after installing packages for the language in question?)
But since VS08/Resharper is so powerfull for c#, I would like to give VS a serious chance. But for that it should have support for langauges that don't compile to CIL.
hence my question : Is Visual Studio a good tool for non .NET languages?
(and like asked on the side : how about refactoring in VIM/EMACS?)
VS is IMO, better then average editor but not something you can't live without.
If you like your editor to open as fast as Notepad with bunch of features, try EditPlus (on the down side it uses older RegExp implementation but on the plus side it can be made to be portable.
If you would like total extensibility, fast startup, inovative fatures, integrated reposity etc.. try E-Editor, windows port of Mac TextMate.
VIM is ofc superb, but ... long learning curve may be a problem and some people can't find themselves in 2 mode editors.
About Resharper... mhm... almost all of its non-code analytic features may be integrated in mentioned editors. For its suggestive features I doubt there is alternative. I disabled it for the moment because I tend to let Resharper fill in my holes so it can be a double bladed sword - sonner or latter I will totally stop thinking about some things like, can this variable be null or can I move its declaration. I run resharper once I finished some working procedure or at the very end to polish the code.
I personaly use EditPlus for all of the NON MS languages, but E-Editor got my attention recently.
I tend to avoid using IDEs outside of the languages they are designed. A dedicated IDE can include class libraries, function references, code completion utilities, etc. out of the box.
Once you step outside that, however, you have a clunky and resource hungry text-editor. You might as well use a text editor in that case just to keep your workstation nimble.
It might be better not to learn one IDE well, but rather a text editor. I've used jEdit for years for several reasons: It's multiplatform, includes syntax highlighting for lots of languages, and can be feature-extended with plugins. It's become one of my standard tools, but it's only one in the box.
How about VI mode for VS? I think Eclipse has one too.
You'll just have to learn vi-related commands, but will be able to work in, C# (with VS), Java (with Eclipse), C++ (with VS or Eclipse), scripting languages (with vi), ...
"I would very much stop using different editors and become very good at one (on windows),"
Why?
"adhering the pragmatic adage : "Learn one editor (ide) well". " Really? How is this pragmatic?
After 30 years in this business, my lesson learned is "tools come and go."
Once upon a time we had big fights over vi vs emacs. Not vim with syntax coloring, but plain-text-vi on black-and-white monitors.
Why narrow your world to one tool? How will you cope with innovation if your tool is not the new state-of-the-art?
As far as C/C++ goes, Visual Studio is considered the gold standard (well, Visual Studio + VAX if you really want to get specific). It's not perfect, and it's certainly not as good as the C# tools it has, but it's still a damn sight better than anything else out there, on any platform. (Assuming you didn't want C99 support.)
Of course it doesn't really do non-.NET other than those two.
I think that there is good specialization at the moment. VS is the clear candidate for .Net, with Resharper and DevExpress as great augmentation for increased productivity.
Currently we use Aptana for the "Web 2.0" stuff - CSS/jQuery/MooTools, and that has been a great environment as well. I have avoided the Intellisense in VS 08 for jQuery and do prototyping in HTML/CSS/JS in Apatana, then do all the Domain design in VS. Works for us pretty well.
It is good for C/C++ but it is not comparable with what you get for C# or VB.Net ( i don't think it support other languages )
for javascript intelisense is still limited