Current state of Visual Studio releases [May 2015]

Hi my blog readers! I know, this blog installment should be out regularly at 19th or 20th May, but there are many things to be discussed and lots of excitements to be shared for you before I publish this. So please be with me

This is the third installment of Visual Studio releases update. In this installment, again, there are many exciting news about Visual Studio!

Here they are:

1. The release of Visual Studio 2015 Release Candidate (also called Visual Studio 2015 RC) on 29th April 2015
2. The release of Visual Studio 2015 SDK Release Candidate (also called Visual Studio 2015 SDK RC) on 29th April 2015
3. The release of Visual Studio Code (preview)
4. The release of Visual Studio 2013 Update 5 Release Candidate on 28th April 2015
5. Github Extension for Visual Studio 2015 release (it’s also available as an option when installing Visual Studio 2015 RC)

Now here are the breakdown of those above. A friendly warning: this is a loooong list, a little bit TLDR.

Visual Studio 2015 Release Candidate

As usual, if Microsoft releases a software that has RC mark, the RTM release is near: within 3-4 months. Yes, it’s at faster cadence as indicated by my previous blog almost 2 years ago: http://fsharpmonologue.blogspot.com/2013/07/current-state-and-product-lifecycle-of.html

NOTE: This meaning of RC thing may be only apply at Microsoft world and this is common at least in the last 14 years (since Windows XP). In detail, the release of RC means the feature is fixed. This simply means that there will be no new features for the next release for the RTM. The next release of RC can be RC2 or the release, usually (officially) named as RTM, or Release-To-Market.

Even at the release of VS 2010, this trend of faster cadence has stabilized. Yes, there was broken rule of semantic versioning between VS 2012 and 2013, and it was quite annoying. The new version of Visual Studio 2013 should be bringing more features instead of just minor updates and fixes.

Fortunately, Visual Studio 2015 has many good news:

1. It’s not just a new release, it has tons of new features compared to Visual Studio 2013
2. VS 2015 has Roslyn (VB and C# compiler as a service) built in. And it’s also open source!
3. Because of the nature of opening Roslyn, the communities are actively influencing the development of Roslyn and therefore the proposals of features are rapidly introduced and many of them are very good!
4. The Visual Studio 2015 family has different products, but the price will be lower than the previous Visual Studio 2013 with MSDN subscription offers. This also includes the next release of Visual Studio 2013 Community Edition, the Visual Studio 2015 RC Community Edition. There will be NO Visual Studio Premium with MSDN subscription for Visual Studio 2015, as the VS 2015 Premium is named as Visual Studio 2015 Professional. The original VS 2015 Professional offering is now Community Edition.
5. CodeLens is available on Visual Studio 2015 Professional. Originally it was available only at Visual Studio 2013 Ultimate Edition since Visual Studio 2013 Ultimate Edition Update 2.
6. The original Ultimate edition is now available named as Enterprise edition in VS 2015

The official announcement is available at Visual Studio blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudio/archive/2015/04/29/build-2015-news-visual-studio-code-visual-studio-2015-rc-team-foundation-server-2015-rc-visual-studio-2013-update-5.aspx

You can download Visual Studio 2015 RC (Community, Professional, Enterprise) at: https://www.visualstudio.com/downloads/visual-studio-2015-downloads-vs

Visual Studio 2015 SDK Release Candidate

This SDK is released at the same time of Visual Studio 2015 Release Candidate. It is also contains the implementation of Roslyn integrated into the way of Visual Studio extension development.

You can also try the samples (included in the SDK) and experiment cool new features of Roslyn, such as building AST of the code (C# and VB only) and analyze your code.

One of the nice features of Visual Studio 2015 is the Light Bulb suggestions when you code using built in managed languages (VB, C#, F#, managed C++) and native C++. Therefore you can also build your own custom Light Bulb suggestions using Visual Studio 2015 SDK. For more information about custom Light Bulb development, visit: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn903708(v=vs.140).aspx

The official announcement of VS 2015 SDK RC is available at the same Visual Studio blog entry above: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudio/archive/2015/04/29/build-2015-news-visual-studio-code-visual-studio-2015-rc-team-foundation-server-2015-rc-visual-studio-2013-update-5.aspx

Visual Studio 2015 SDK RC can be downloaded at: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=46850

Visual Studio Code

A new Visual Studio family is here! It’s very light, free, and cross platform!

Now why I emphasize this? There has been a strong image that Visual Studio will never have lightweight editor that runs on OS other than Windows!

What is Visual Studio Code, really?

It is simply a lightweight development editor but with intelligent features partially borrowed from a full big IDEs such as intellisense, code completion, keyword highlights. It’s based on Omnisharp, a lightweight editor that is also open source. The web development editing part is based on Electron, a subpart of Atom which is also open source. Omnisharp itself is an Atom package that provides C# and ASP.NET support.

At the time of this writing; Visual Studio Code isn’t yet reached RTM. The initial version number is version 0.1.0.

This is the official home page of Visual Studio Code: https://code.visualstudio.com/

One more thing, I have mentioned cross platform! Because Visual Studio Code runs not just on Windows, but it can run on Linux Linux 64-bit, and MacOS.

To download the current Visual Studio Code, you can get it at the landing page (home page) above.

Visual Studio 2013 Update 5 Release Candidate

Yes, you got it right: it’s another update for Visual Studio 2013 after Update 4.

Now what does this Update 5 have? Actually, it’s simply Update 4 with numerous bug fixes and a small additional feature, including these notable bug fixes:

• KB 3018885 FIX: You cannot dismiss developer license notifications in Visual Studio 2013 Update 4 (for Visual Studio IDE)
• Capturing depth buffers on version 9.3 hardware is now supported. This enables support for graphics debugging Unity-based applications that run on Windows Phone.

The additional small features are:

• Team Project rename support for Team Foundation Server (on premises). Visual Studio Online also has this feature.
• A new query token for query iteration: @CurrentIteration (it is case sensitive name). This feature is previously available on Visual Studio Online since March 10. See https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/news/2015-mar-10-vso.aspx

NOTE:

This update is the last release of Visual Studio 2013 update, so there will be no next Visual Studio 2013 Update after Update 5.

Github Extension for Visual Studio 2015

There is support for GitHub built in, not just Git repo support since Visual Studio 2013 initial RTM release. This extension is available as an option when installing VS 2015 or as stand alone installation.

Not just GitHub, but initial feature of pull request, merge, diff, sync, graph is also available.

This is the announcement from official Visual Studio blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudio/archive/2015/04/30/announcing-the-github-extension-for-visual-studio.aspx

The picture below is taken from the blog entry:

To download stand alone installation of this GitHub extension, visit: https://visualstudio.github.com/?CR_CC=200627595

Speaking on Lambda Jakarta: welcoming new Lambda Jakarta meetup member, new organizer, platform concern, and more

Lambda Jakarta meetup time! Now the meetup is themed “Casual Meetup”. This meetup is now located at Starbuck, at Tebet Green Mall on May 9, 2015.
The meetup is casual, as currently we didn’t have defined talks to be delivered but we have free topics (about programming language, of course) and still mainly focusing on functional programming.
For the detail on this meetup, visit the official event page: http://www.meetup.com/Lambda-Jakarta/events/222067797/

Agenda on this meetup is themed basically on these:

1. Announcement of new organizer, handled from Abdullah to Tino (a.k.a. “Kusut”)
2. Planning for the next meetup to have some presentations for next meetup. Again, I voluntarily for the next meetup

Without further ado, let’s welcome Kusut as the new organizer! Kusut has been around for more than 6 years in programming. Currently he has been fluent in Python, Ruby. For the last 2 years he began to dive into Haskell, with the help of Abdullah and Erik. By the way, Erik was one of the original founder of Lambda Jakarta meetup.

UPDATE 1: The original founder is Abdullah, Kusut and Asep. Thanks for clarifications, Erik :)

We welcomed new members: Rezha, Irvan and 2 more (sorry guys, I can’t remember your real names). Reza is still undergraduate student, with a passion to learn more than just OOP and procedural programming languages in his study! Irvan is still working at Traveloka as team leader and also software architect.
This is the picture:

The total of attendances was not so many, it was about 15 attendants. But we have so much fun discussing what happened in programming language world, and we agreed that we will touch more on platform.

After we introduced ourselves, we had topics to discuss. As always, I was happy to answer and discuss more on F#, .NET and platform relevance.

Platform (runtime platform) concern

Platform in this sense is platform in a sense of runtime platform, either .NET (and its Mono on Linux/UNIX) and Java. True that we as Lambdas love Haskell, but Haskell itself can’t be considered as true platform on its own. I shall focusing on the runtime virtualization platform on these two: .NET and Java.

Non runtime virtualization is usually native and closer to metal, like Win32, Bash, Csh, ObjectiveC, and many more (including DirectX, device driver).

A simple illustration about this native versus virtualized is:

Now you may wonder, why .NET/Mono apps (and hence Java) called managed? Because they have their own virtualization on top of the native OS runtime.
Therefore this bring these consequences:

1. Applications has their own shared virtualized runtime, often in some isolated fashion (in modern OS such as Windows Store Apps in Windows 8.0 and 8.1)
2. Memory, I/O, and other side effects are managed as abstracted from the underlying native OS. Often the virtualization provides some mechanism to access native OS API. Some example of this is the use of P/Invoke within .NET apps and JNI within Java.
3. These abstractions can add a little overhead to the performance, but this is by design. This also brings more room for innovations such as cross platforms (in a sense of running on other OS platform). We see in real world as Java and .NET/Mono, that runs on Windows and Linux/UNIX/MacOS.
4. When these virtualized apps run, not just in a managed environment but most of them are often well behaved as they often have a little knowledge of how they run in parallel according to the underlying OS. Therefore there are no simple or definite way to provide one-on-one performance profile on many OS. This is why (again) managed applications are mostly not geared for performance when compared against native applications.

Now that we understand why they are managed, it’s time to understand implications on the functional programming world. We know that Scala in Java and F# in .NET/Mono are the strong contender for the managed programming languages that also functional!

But then, at the core of those platforms, the virtualized platforms matter itself. The choice between Java or .NET is still not easy, as each platforms has their own advantages over the others.

Platform (runtime platform) choice

Why the choice of the runtime matters more? Because there’s no easy interoperability between the two major platform.

My own choice? The answer is complicated, but for those like me that already has enough manhours spent on these two, the clear winner (although it has its own disadvantages) is .NET.Let’s dive into the current states of Java as runtime.
Java 8, the latest incarnation of JDK, has these:

1. Generic support (using type erasure strategy) since JDK 1.4
2. wildcard for covariance/contravariance relaxation, but it’s still partial due to type erasure
3. rich type reflection through bean descriptor and class mechanism (explicit setter and getter)
4. No tail call support yet

.NET 4.5 has these:

1. Generic support using type reification strategy since .NET 2.0
2. support for STRUCT type (value type as .NET called it)
3. Iterator since .NET 2.0
4. Parallel support since .NET 4.0
5. Covariance/contravariance in generics
6. rich type reflection through inherent setter getter with properties
7. tail call

My main reasons in deciding that .NET is the winner are the type reification, STRUCT type, and the covariance/contravariance support. There are also minor comparing factor such as Lambda statements in Java, but this is not a true comparison as Lambda is truly language feature, not runtime feature.

 

Curious about type erasure? Read this from the official source: https://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/java/generics/erasure.html

But for me, the most decisive factor is the use of type erasure in Java. It’s quite annoying because the type information can’t be ensured at runtime! This is the big issue in Java that is a big disadvantages compared to .NET. It’s also a wrong decision at start, for the sake of compatibility.
This matter of type erasure choice has its own backup supporters, such as this guy in a blog post for example. But still in that article, he also mentioned that it’s still a wrong decision.
Further implications? Many! The nature of functional programming languages are strong type everywhere, including generic supports. This weak generic support of Java can make even Scala losing its backers in long run as it doesn’t fit for strong functional programming runtime.
Hey, I’m not Java haters! I’m still a polyglot developers, and I still have high hope for Java. For Java 9, there will be a support for STRUCT type, and Java 9 will be the starting point to support type reification, by paving the way for STRUCT.
This means that we’ll see type reification after Java 9. But the exact release will be further decided by the community and Oracle. Don’t be excited first, guys.

What about Haskell?

Unfortunately there’s no definite answer about this. We still don’t know yet about mature support of Haskell in Java or .NET. There is GHC for .NET, but this support is still far from mature and stable although it was developed by Simon Peyton Jones, the same guy developed GHC.
My big intelligent guess is: there’s no direct support for type classes in the runtime, and it’s also quite hard to implement pure functional language boiled into the managed runtime. Try implementing Haskell’s IO monad using the managed runtime, for example. You will find it quite hard even for long time .NET developers.
That’s it, folks! Can’t wait to attend the next Lambda meetups!