Hacker News Reader

Comment by Delmania | Hacker News Reader

> I still don't understand how Microsoft was able to provide a better debugging and tooling experience for Android, than Google itself for their own OS, although Android Studio 2.2 finally seems to be usable.

Visual Studio was first released in 1997, the company has 20 years experience in designing and building tooling. I believe they also have a very firm dogfooding policy, and some very intelligent people work there.

Google changed the search engine landscape and created the only competitor to the iPhone, but building tools and tooling is definitely not a key strength.

View on HN

Surely a few of those PhDs able to draw inverted tree algorithms on the whiteboard should be capable of producing a proper IDE that doesn't hang the computer all the time, an OS simulator and get their mind around how to have an actual working build system for NDK users.

But Android Studio is basically IntelliJ IDEA, which is not that much younger at 15 years.

The parent's point was that MS have the institutional memory and expertise that you don't get by simply forking someone else's codebase.

Except browser tooling, where they are far ahead of others.

Compared to VS, chrome dev tools are bloody awful.

There are some incredibly annoying basic missing features in Chrome dev tools. Like you still can't just hover over a variable, you inexplicably need to highlight it. Functionality that IE dev toolbar had 10 years ago. And don't even get me started on their shitty black boxing solution, something that should be as easy as right clicking on the file you want to black box, but no, time for some bloody regex foo.

It's better than Firefox + IE, by it's not better than proper IDEs by a long shot. And it's got "designed by a programmer" written all over it, the UX is awful.

Well, on the other hand, while debugging, if I recall correctly, in Eclipse you can select an (almost) arbitrary section of code and evaluate it. In Visual Studio for the same thing you have to use the clunky "Watches" feature. So even VS can improve.

In Visual Studio for the same thing you have to use the clunky "Watches" feature.

VS has the 'immediate window' which allows you to execute (almost) any statement within the context of the local scope, including intellisense and autocomplete.

Caveat to the use of lambdas... Where, ironically the last time I used .Net was what I needed to inspect the most were subsets of collections or the results of other queries... I always used the function methods for linq over the language extension.

Lambdas are supported in the debugger as of Visual Studio 2015 :)

Thanks.. can you tell I haven't done nearly as much .Net for the past couple years? ;-) Though the .Net core stuff has me relatively excited for the platform again.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com