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> There are days when I just write code in Notepad++ and only use Visual Studio to build.

Judging from what I've seen from Windows game programming streamers like Casey Muratori and Jonathan Blow, it's not an uncommon practice to live in your preferred editor then flip to VS for build/debug.

It all seems very strange and ridiculous to me coming from a gnu/linux/vim/screen/make/gdb background. Obviously not so much having separate tools, but more the despite having a massive beast of an IDE purportedly providing All The Things, you're still context switching to/from your usable editor.

Those streamers also often resort to using RemedyBG for debugging instead of using VS's integrated debugging. They're basically living without an IDE, while paying all the overhead for an IDE, because the IDE is such trash.

It seems like they'd be better off bypassing VS altogether and just do the builds on the command line.

To be fair notepad++ is pretty good

Microsoft has always had shit UX. MS-DOS 6.2x was an improvement over DOS 3.3. Windows 3.x wasn't as clean as it could've been. Windows 95 went too far on special effects. Windows NT was the successor to the failure of the OS/2 joint venture. OS/2 was quite an achievement and very stable. NT 3.1-3.5x had teething pains while NT 4 SP6 became solid. Windows 2000 was quite solid and preferable to XP.

Apple has had functionality that is moved and taken away in the quest for "perfect tomorrow someday" UX and functionality (merging macOS and iPadOS).

No Linux/GNU distro, not even Ubuntu, has reached a point to where functionality AND UX were both good enough for average non-engineer grandma.

FreeBSD usability is about in the Linux/GNU camp. There's less to manage under FreeBSD but it's not as ubiquitous.

> No Linux/GNU distro, not even Ubuntu, has reached a point to where functionality AND UX were both good enough for average non-engineer grandma.

Disagree. I have my (extremely) non-technical wife and 8 year old son on Linux laptops and it's totally fine. Is it perfect? No. But it's good enough. I'm the one who updates them, though.

Support is key: I don't support my (extremely non-technical) mom's Windows laptop or her iPhone because there's nothing for me to do. (My mom had a stroke and is mid 70's.) She wouldn't be able to use anything other than Windows because the retraining burden would be too great. I would expect most 8-year-olds to easily move between any OS because they're far more adaptable than ye olde fuddy-duddy adults.

PS: Which Linux distro?

Manjaro for my son and some kind of Ubuntu flavor for my wife.

My elderly parents use a Xubuntu laptop just fine. It ended up with Xubuntu because I got pissed off at the Win 11 Home Edition registration bullshit, and all my parents really use is the web browser.

If I did it again, I'd probably use Linux Mint Cinnamon.

IMO, Windows UI/UX has gotten so bad, even Gnome seems like an drastic improvement.

Sounds like a Chromebook or iPad would've been enough.

I did a T480 motherboard integrated i7-8550U -> discrete i7-8650U swap and rebinding of the license with their phone support. I somehow finagled a Windows 11 Enterprise (retail channel) license that Redmond doesn't have a problem with. It's a cheapskate gaming machine for an eGPU RTX3060 Ti. They can try to pry my dual battery T480 from my cold dead hands, but I'll probably reinstall Qubes on it.

< It ended up with Xubuntu because I got pissed off at the Win 11 Home Edition registration bullshit, and all my parents really use is the web browser.

Yes, a few weeks I spent an hour on the phone walking my Dad through registering Windows 11 and registering his copy of Office. It was abso-fucking-lutely terrible. He didn't even want a live account/address, nor one drive. My Dad browses the web and writes short stories.

Despite spending $149 on his Office license, he has warmed to Google docs, especially that he can share the document and I can help him with the layout very easily. I hope he'll just stop using Word altogether.

WRT updates and restarting, we went through quite a bit of effort tracking down exactly the settings needed to disable update checking, because once it checks for updates it seems like there is basically no way you can prevent it from rebooting on it's own at some point in the future. And this is on Windows Server, where you'd think they'd be even more reluctant to just reboot.

We ended up with this, BTW:

    Set-ItemProperty 'HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsUpdate\AU\' -Name NoAutoUpdate -Value 1

>this is on Windows Server

That is absolutely insane having Windows Server auto update and reboot.

What if it was something critical, like a production line or a server supporting medical devices?

Microsoft doesn't appear to care anymore.

I think this is where MS would tell you to upgrade to an "enterprise" version of Windows Server. These generally have more control over things like automatic updates and rebooting.

MSFT seems to be a lost cause these days. Whenever I open up VS2022, it takes almost an entire minute to load. As I recompile things, it will fail to report errors, which means restarting the application (which seems to "fix" it).

If I open SSMS, it also takes upwards of a minute to load. Some things I used to take for granted, like being able to see the cursor when scrolling with the arrow keys, instead makes the cursor invisible, so now I have no idea where my cursor lands when I release the key. When a connection to a DB bonks out (which happens at least once a day), it takes another minute to close out my open windows, because each one had an open session and it needs to prompt me on close.

If I open Excel, another minute passes before it loads. If I stupidly decide to change the font for some cells, I expect to see the app lock up for another minute or two. If I want to save the document, I have to go through several layers of menus and garbage just to save to my computer and not the cloud. And then I will still get an alert in Excel that indicates it was unable to save to the cloud and that I need to take some action to resolve the files. The best part is now I can't simply scroll the rows in a spreadsheet in the background while I have another app in the foreground. I have to make another click to bring the spreadsheet into focus to scroll.

If I go into the Azure Portal, I can expect no sane or consistent interface. Components seem to be cargo-cult designed without regard to how they are used. I was looking at some app service logs today, and I'm stuck using their ugly UI, which truncates/hides important data, like the actual log message. The UI is so antithetical to what a logging user interface should look like (think Splunk or Sumo), you'd be better off just downloading the CSV file.

The same goes for build logs in Azure DevOps. It doesn't word-wrap, so now you need to scroll all the way across the screen, line-by-line, to figure out the message. If I click on the Raw Log link, I get the logs, but polluted with ANSI escape codes. If I try to copy the text as is, the UI may or may not select all of it.

And this is just the very start for the disaster that is Azure Portal/DevOps.

And Teams, lol.

When you have to deal with all these problems, all day long, it really starts to sink your productivity. MSFT badly needs a leadership shakeup, but I doubt that will happen as long as Azure is profitable. Until then, I expect to see more decline in the quality of their developer and productivity applications.

Microsoft employs a lot of lifers who have no idea how good tooling is on the outside.

Presumably, there were a lot of lifers at MSFT during the Windows 7 years, yet I would consider the software being delivered during that period as being pretty good.

The decline happened after they fired off their SDETs and turned their customers into testers. The hyperfocus on cloud didn't help. Neither did the move towards clunky Electron apps, instead of first-class Windows applications.

Publicly traded companies have to keep releasing. They can't stop at 7, call it a day, and focus on important-but-not-sales-driving features.

Lifers may be there still, but they have to march to the beat of the stock market.

I use XCode, Android Studio and Emacs daily. I'd say all three are C- tools.

One idea about Excel: Keep it running all the time, with a new, empty doc. Then, you never pay the start-up cost. Laughably, that is my strategy these days. Same for Adobe Acrobat.

Very strange... Excel is one of the quickest apps on my system. It takes a second to load, if that.

SSMS is become unbearable to open. It's insane how long it takes. Not even to connect, just to get the dialogue box to select an instance to connect to.

If you want to like Windows again try the last verison of Windows 10 LTSC. Its pretty damn amazing. All of the crapware is stripped out and yet it still has the insane backwards compatiblity and ability to be installed on a huge range of devices (very underrated features of Windows). The battery life after installing on my laptop is insane. It boots up insanely fast.

I have to imagine there a bunch of software engineers at Microsoft who have worked their asses off and are proud of what the core of Windows has become but are also super frustrated at all of the BS that is loaded on top in 99% of installs.....

Windows 10 LTSC - I couldn't agree more. If this version doesn't exist I'd be only using Windows for gaming at this point. I still heavily modify LTSC but it's a big improvement from the unusable HOME version.

Switch to Proton for linux gaming. It's pretty dang good, and at this point the only thing I struggle with on Linux is VR.

Can I get a single license for Windows 10 LTSC? I was under the impression that you need to buy multiple lisences.

I haven't heard of this before. Thank you for the tip :)

The forced updates are truly outrageous. It particularly irks me since I always chose them over apple for respecting that after a purchase transaction ends, the product is mine, and I need no longer deal with them if I don't care to. And bending over backwards to maintain backwards compatibility. It was an enterprise focus. They have gotten some bad press for the auto updates, so I'm sure they have made a calculated decision to stick with them. And it's hard to blame them looking at how much money they've raked in since this pivot early/mid 2010s.

For what it's worth, it's (still, as of writing) possible to turn off forced autoupdates via Group Policy if you buy and use Windows 10/11 Professional.

Any power user would be well served to reuse one of their old 7/8 Pro licenses or buy a 10/11 Pro license instead of cheaping out on a Home license.

The real problem with "it's still possible to turn off forced autoupdates" is that you don't know whether you can turn it off, due to Windows ignoring explicit "turn X off" switches. Why should the user trust you to respect any other switch?

Also, the user should be able to assume that there aren't multiple switches for the same action. As a general rule - I know this is Windows.

Group Policy is an enterprise feature, violating Group Policy means Windows becomes persona non grata in its most profitable market sector.

So yes, you can rely on Windows and Microsoft to respect Group Policy. The catch is you need to pay for enterprise privileges if you're not.

100% right. I felt the same way for many years.

I've worked on a lot of large and complex projects (mostly kernels) using just vim, git, gdb, cscope, and ctags for development for the past 15 years. I think I've encountered maybe one or two quality of life vim bugs in that time, and a few annoying gdb bugs.

Like AI, until someone shows me something that can come up with novel solutions to deeply technical problems, simple tools and intelligence on the part of the programmer is what works.

You're right of course.

Unfortunately I don't have any choice in the matter of compiler or platforms. I do some work work on Linux and I use GCC there. It feels much more sane.

Visual Studio makes me want to take more blood pressure medication.

This is tier one thinking. Maybe top taking the blood pressure meds and get a little bit more angry and your mindset will change.

Until then, enjoy your MSFT environment that they've created for the lowest common denominator. You try the code-gen / no-code tools yet? Maybe they'll make you happier. Developers, developers, developers!!

you still can invoke msbuild manually. If I really need to test on Windows, most of the time it's a CMake project so I just generate build files for VSCode, go back to whatever editor I like and `cmake --build .` to launch the build job.

There will always be an option to replace morally bankrupt software... It may come late, but it will come. Napster came out of a need to de-fund greed, so did bittorrent and re-engineered/edited software builds, and many other solutions created by the more ethical/enterprising parts of the underworld.

As shareholder-driven greed consumes these large monolithic companies and their overhead eats them out of their massive office campuses, they will eventually realize that product coexistence and maintaining product reliability/performance while putting customers first will be the only way to survive once their guaranteed government buying partnerships face a new audit and dry up fast.

The cycle is terrible to productivity and for our sanity, and ad revenue is not worth all of the stress they put all of us through. There will also be lawsuits and many other issues raised eventually once people realize that getting robbed at an ATM because you had to watch a 5 minute ad, before your withdrawal completes, is a very stupid idea.

> On one hand, I've been one of Microsoft's biggest fans.

Microsoft helped lift me my family out of poverty. I grew up in Seattle, in the shadow of Microsoft and their Redmond campus. My father was a laborer who helped built Bill Gate's mansion, and who helped built parts of their Redmond campus.

He was incredibly, incredibly, proud, that I drove to work everyday down the streets he had helped plant trees on. He told almost everyone he met that his son worked at Microsoft.

Microsoft did a lot of good in the 90s and early 2000s[0], they created a standard platform which the world built upon. They created a stable foundation for thousands upon thousands of developers to build their livelihood. They paid for generations of children to learn programming in free or next to free programs across the country (and across the world). Since their missteps and the rise of mobile, the industry hasn't had a stable development platform to build upon, and we've collectively wasted untold billions of dollars in productivity on crappy cross platform solutions.

When I was at Microsoft, the customer was king. I put a stop to plenty of bad behavior by saying "is this what is right for the customer?" and if the answer was no, code didn't ship.

But Microsoft is a fear driven company, they were afraid of the rise of the tablet so they made Windows 8, and then they became afraid of Google so they constantly attempt to go for ads. (First they went for search, but then eventually realized Google isn't a search company...) Heck the original reason Explorer was supposed to get tabs was so ads could be shown in new explorer tabs[1].

The other problem is, Microsoft got rid of Software Development Engineers in Test, and they replaced them with devs doing test. But at Microsoft, SDETs served as the last line of defense for the users, as an SDET it was made clear to me from day 1 of my employment that I had the power to stop shipment of software if I felt the code wasn't up to snuff. As a junior SDET I only ever used that power once, I was damn well scared, and when I spoke up and said we had open bugs that I personally considered ship blockers, the lead dev said no problem, the release would be delayed until his team fixed the bugs.

No one has that role anymore. Before I left MS around 2016 or so, I saw a fellow developer instructed by the design team to make a UI component behave as if it followed the MacOS design guidelines. The (junior) dev didn't realize that was what he had been told to do, and it obviously took a long time for him to beat the Windows UI controls into shape until they worked like the MacOS UI controls, and when I asked him why he was doing this, he said he was too scared to push back.

That is what SDETs were for. To hold the bloody line. Facebook's "move fast an break things" motto gave the industry an excuse to gut dedicated test teams, and now all software everywhere sucks, but no one under 30 realizes anything is wrong because from their perspective things have always been shitty and broken.

[0] Yes yes and Linux bad lawsuits etc etc, separate discussion. [1] The ads were to be for Microsoft Store apps IIRC.

> The other problem is, Microsoft got rid of Software Development Engineers in Test, and they replaced them with devs doing test. But at Microsoft, SDETs served as the last line of defense for the users, as an SDET it was made clear to me from day 1 of my employment that I had the power to stop shipment of software if I felt the code wasn't up to snuff. As a junior SDET I only ever used that power once, I was damn well scared, and when I spoke up and said we had open bugs that I personally considered ship blockers, the lead dev said no problem, the release would be delayed until his team fixed the bugs.

I worked for almost 27 years, for a Japanese optical corporation that is synonymous with "Quality."

Their QC department was the most powerful one in the corporation, and all the devs lived in fear of failing QCT, as that would have C-Suite-level notice.

In the US, there used to be a joke, saying "If you have 'Quality' in your job title, your career is over." At this company, it meant you were just short of a God.

That said, it tended to make life stressful for us. As an American development team, we were often treated as "Bad Software Cowboys." Most folks here, would consider us to be completely uptight, anal-retentive, risk-averse, babies, but they thought of us as reckless.

> In the US, there used to be a joke, saying "If you have 'Quality' in your job title, your career is over." At this company, it meant you were just short of a God.

I would welcome this as a cultural change in the US. It just sucks living downstream of people dumping tons of cowboy code into the river.

I'm neither on Windows nor do I currently write C/C++ stuff, but I just saw a video about RemedyBG, a debugger for Windows that seems to be really nice. Maybe that would help you at least in that regard.

The video that I saw: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9eQth4Q5jg

Wow! Thank you for sharing this :)

If you are writing C or C++, is JetBrains' CLion an option? If you are writing C#, is JetBrains' Rider an option?

Rider is pretty good. I haven't fully switched over yet, just because the rest of my team uses VS2019/VS2022.

It's not an option, unfortunately. We are like 99% VS in house.

> I had to tell Windows that my internet connection was metered in order to get them to stop with the updates.

Nice tip. Any downsides to this?

Run VS on a m2 Mac in Parallels .