(Not so) funny that there was nothing "visual" in Visual C++. The dialog resource editor was a joke. I remember how I was relieved when I discovered Borland C++Builder, so I didn't have to switch to Delphi for Windows software development.
userbinator · 4h ago
Interesting to see the UI change (degradation) over time. The first version makes it very clear what's a button and clickable at first glance, while the latest version looks like a sea of whitespace and makes that far more difficult.
keithnz · 3h ago
It doesn't point out the massive productivity boost of Visual C++ 6, IntelliSense (ie, autocomplete). This saved so much time from having to look up documentation.
philiplu · 3h ago
I worked on that! I was a dev on the team that built the first IntelliSense engine for C++. It’s a miracle it worked at all. It was based on a hacked-up version of the C++ front-end, but when it inevitably hit errors attempting a single-pass parse of the current source, it would silently bull its way through and try not to get too screwed up. Doing that in the presence of templates was not a good time. But with the RAM and processing speeds available then, I’m still kind of shocked it worked at all, 28 years ago.
zerr · 1h ago
No offense but the first thing I used to do after MSVC installation was the installation of Visual Assist :)
sipsi · 2h ago
nice documentation
lepicz · 1h ago
heh, sorry, but intellisense was the first thing we (in a game studio) turned off immeadiately after install (by deleting the dll as there was no other way) because it was unacceptable resource hog. this was around VS 2003/2005/2008.
visual assist x worked better.
jenadine · 23m ago
Last one is 2012... I would like to see a sequel with how it evolved in the last 10 years.
AdieuToLogic · 3h ago
You know what this doesn't show?
Visual C++ v4.2b generating an assignment operator which invoked the destructor of a returned object before assigning it to the lval.
That was fun to figure out. :-/
Disposal8433 · 3h ago
I remember a bug in an old Visual C++ that would fill your RAM and swap (therefore hard drive) if you forgot a semicolon at the end of a class, like:
class A { int a }
int main(...)
To fix that, you had to kill the compiler process.
reactordev · 20m ago
I lost a game prototype to that bug as it crashed my HDD at the same time by writing swap over swap. Screwing up the S.M.A.R.T. page.
Hard reboot left it doa. With today’s tools it could have been recovered but I lacked gparted and a kali thumb stick to bring it back. So thankful for Linux.
agent327 · 2h ago
Nice one... I seem to remember MSVC 5 having a switch that made all functions virtual - or am I confused with another compiler?
copper_think · 4h ago
One thing not mentioned is that Visual C++ and Visual Basic historically were separate IDEs with separate codebases. When the time came to unify them, only one of them could continue on. My understanding is that Visual Basic won, and that today's Visual Studio IDE (devenv.exe, msenv.dll, etc.) is the continuation of that VB codebase.
I don't actually know in which release that transition happened. But since there's a screenshot of each version in the article, presumably that transition is visually documented...
ack_complete · 4h ago
That might have been the transition from Visual C++/Basic 4 to 6 (I skipped 5), but the cataclysmic one was the switch from Visual Studio 6 to Visual Studio .NET, when large portions of the IDE and build system were rewritten in .NET. Visual Studio .NET (2002) was much slower and much buggier than VS6. The native debugger was glacial at conditional breakpoints and debug output, the build system took an eternity to do a dependency check, its UI visibly redrew more slowly, etc. It was so bad that Microsoft had to create a special offer for the Visual Studio .NET (2003) upgrade for only ~$30.
This transition was not great for Visual Basic developers either since their language was transitioned from generating native code (VB6) to becoming dependent upon the .NET Framework (VB.NET), supported secondarily to C#.
aaronbrethorst · 3h ago
If memory serves, it was Visual InterDev that won, actually. The VID IDE was the forerunner to Visual Studio.NET 2002, which was the first unified Visual Studio IDE.
n.b. I worked on the Visual Studio Core team, which maintained devenv.exe, among other things, from 2003-2007'ish.
LordN00b · 1h ago
Visual InterDev was the first IDE I ever used outside of notepad.
It was bundled in with one Microsofts early webediting tools with office (97/200)....but not FrontPage.
I thought I was touching the future, it was so amazing! I really don't remember much about other than the impression that it left on me.
becurious · 4h ago
After Visual C++ 6. They broke a lot of the C++ IDE features and they weren’t as good as the prior versions (dialog editor etc) so for a long time we preferred staying on 6. I think if we could have the newer compilers but the snappiness of that UI many developers would be happy.
It’s also a product of the segmentation of the developer tools in Microsoft. The Windows team was responsible for the compiler rather than the Developer Tools team.
philiplu · 4h ago
No, that's not really true. I was on the C++ compiler team from 1991 to 2006. When I first started, the DevTools team reported up through the Windows team, but never really felt a well-integrated part. We were never in the same building as the Windows team, for instance. I remember, probably 1992 or 1993, driving from building 4 where the compiler team lived to the Windows building (forget which one that was, maybe in the 12 to 15 block back then?) to get a copy of the Windows NT source on a hard drive. That's because I was a dev on the C++ compiler back-end team then (moved to the front-end in '95, IIRC), and compiling that source was a major test of the 32-bit compiler I was working on.
Don't remember when DevTools was re-orged out from under Windows, but I'm pretty sure it was by '95, and well before VC++ 6.
becurious · 3h ago
Did you ever work on the cross edition that would compile Windows apps for the Mac? I think that was a version 4 fork that never got another version.
philiplu · 3h ago
No, there were two devs working on the 68k Mac compiler, with ~10 devs on the x86 side (though both targets shared a lot of code and differed mainly in the late codegen and peephole optimization phases). I never worked on the 16-bit code; the 32-bit and later 64-bit x86 backend was a different codebase from the 16-bit stuff.
daemin · 1h ago
Any idea how many devs are working at Microsoft on the C and C++ compilers these days? I've heard rumours that there's more on the Rust team and that C++ is taking a back seat.
philiplu · 1h ago
No clue. I left as a full-time employee in 2007, did a few contractor gigs with various old teams of mine to help out, but that was done by 2013. I lost touch with how things were going internally after that.
ack_complete · 3h ago
The dialog editor is a good example of the damage that was done with the VS.NET transition. When they rewrote it to use the WinForms-based UI, they introduced a fundamental bug: the Z-order for picking was reversed so that clicking on a stack of controls selected the one on the bottom. Very annoying for controls like group controls intended to be stacked below other controls. Bug filed, WONTFIX'd, and it's still broken to this day.
zerr · 1h ago
Afaik Win32 API explicitly states that overlapping sibling windows/controls is not supported.
keithnz · 3h ago
the big thing I missed was their macro editor, it was really good for automating things.
georgeecollins · 4h ago
I think that is right and perhaps that is why, as I recall, Visual C went from almost unusable to a pretty good development environment between version 2 and 4. This is all (old) memory and anecdote.
birn559 · 2h ago
When / How did versioning enter versioning the awkward state we have today? There is cl.exe, MSBuild and build chain at the very least (now at work computer at the moment, pretty sure I am wrong with the making here) with versioning that is close enough to each other to be confusing and related to each other in word ways. Naming itself also feels confusing to me. Documentation also only helps when you already have a good idea what's going on.
jasode · 1h ago
>When / How did versioning enter versioning the awkward state we have today? There is cl.exe, MSBuild and build chain
The multiple confusing version numbers are caused by each software component (e.g. "cl.exe" vs "msbuild.exe" vs IDE "devenv.exe" vs platform toolkit SDK) evolving separately over decades. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Visual_C%2B%2B#Inter...)
E.g. Today's "cl.exe" at version 19.x goes all the way back to 1983 with Microsoft C 1.0 for MS-DOS. Just a text-based command line compiler with no C++, no GUI, no "Studio", etc. 43 years of the core compiler going from 1.x to 19.x. The Visual IDE component of VC++ version 17.x has a different version history going back to 1993 with 1.0. Microsoft C# also has different version numbers of C# language version vs .NET version vs CLR version, etc.
It's analogous to Linux world of different tools with different version numbers. GCC is 15.x, glibc is 2.4, make is 4.4, etc. If you include a "visual GUI IDE" like Jetbrains CLion, that's yet another different version.
Microsoft could hypothetically "synchronize unify" all version numbers for all disparate products to be a single number ... akin to Apple using version "26" to synchronize Xcode with iOS, etc by introducing large numerical gaps like v18 --> v26. That's probably not going to happen. Likewise, different groups at GNU are not going to agree to synchronize all version numbers such that next release will be GCC 20.0, glibc 20.0, and make 20.0.
pavlov · 56m ago
The “Visual” in this product’s name was one of the greatest disappointments of my childhood. [1]
I had dabbled in both QuickBASIC and Quick C on MS-DOS building very simple text games and such. When Visual Basic for Windows came out, I was ten years old. It was a revelation because it let me build something that felt like real software. Place controls on a canvas and start wiring them up with event handlers — so easy!
When Visual C++ was announced, I figured it would be the next step up. I had already learned some simple C, so probably it’s just like Visual Basic but you use an improved C for your event handlers? I harangued my dad to “borrow” a copy from his work, and sat down with the Hello World… Which was an incomprehensible 300 lines of Win32 message handlers and Hungarian notation variable names. Nothing “Visual” about it.
It did give me an appreciation for just how much work the Visual Basic team had done to hide the ugly guts of GUI programming.
- -
[1] I had a very easy childhood by most standards.
scrubs · 1h ago
History of VS? I'd rather learn about cat fur or lint ... you know something that's interesting.
visual assist x worked better.
Visual C++ v4.2b generating an assignment operator which invoked the destructor of a returned object before assigning it to the lval.
That was fun to figure out. :-/
Hard reboot left it doa. With today’s tools it could have been recovered but I lacked gparted and a kali thumb stick to bring it back. So thankful for Linux.
I don't actually know in which release that transition happened. But since there's a screenshot of each version in the article, presumably that transition is visually documented...
This transition was not great for Visual Basic developers either since their language was transitioned from generating native code (VB6) to becoming dependent upon the .NET Framework (VB.NET), supported secondarily to C#.
n.b. I worked on the Visual Studio Core team, which maintained devenv.exe, among other things, from 2003-2007'ish.
It’s also a product of the segmentation of the developer tools in Microsoft. The Windows team was responsible for the compiler rather than the Developer Tools team.
Don't remember when DevTools was re-orged out from under Windows, but I'm pretty sure it was by '95, and well before VC++ 6.
The multiple confusing version numbers are caused by each software component (e.g. "cl.exe" vs "msbuild.exe" vs IDE "devenv.exe" vs platform toolkit SDK) evolving separately over decades. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Visual_C%2B%2B#Inter...)
E.g. Today's "cl.exe" at version 19.x goes all the way back to 1983 with Microsoft C 1.0 for MS-DOS. Just a text-based command line compiler with no C++, no GUI, no "Studio", etc. 43 years of the core compiler going from 1.x to 19.x. The Visual IDE component of VC++ version 17.x has a different version history going back to 1993 with 1.0. Microsoft C# also has different version numbers of C# language version vs .NET version vs CLR version, etc.
It's analogous to Linux world of different tools with different version numbers. GCC is 15.x, glibc is 2.4, make is 4.4, etc. If you include a "visual GUI IDE" like Jetbrains CLion, that's yet another different version.
Microsoft could hypothetically "synchronize unify" all version numbers for all disparate products to be a single number ... akin to Apple using version "26" to synchronize Xcode with iOS, etc by introducing large numerical gaps like v18 --> v26. That's probably not going to happen. Likewise, different groups at GNU are not going to agree to synchronize all version numbers such that next release will be GCC 20.0, glibc 20.0, and make 20.0.
I had dabbled in both QuickBASIC and Quick C on MS-DOS building very simple text games and such. When Visual Basic for Windows came out, I was ten years old. It was a revelation because it let me build something that felt like real software. Place controls on a canvas and start wiring them up with event handlers — so easy!
When Visual C++ was announced, I figured it would be the next step up. I had already learned some simple C, so probably it’s just like Visual Basic but you use an improved C for your event handlers? I harangued my dad to “borrow” a copy from his work, and sat down with the Hello World… Which was an incomprehensible 300 lines of Win32 message handlers and Hungarian notation variable names. Nothing “Visual” about it.
It did give me an appreciation for just how much work the Visual Basic team had done to hide the ugly guts of GUI programming.
- -
[1] I had a very easy childhood by most standards.