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Moving to Visual Studio 2015+ Rate Topic: -----

#1 User is offline   James Ross 

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Posted 10 May 2017 - 12:43 PM

We've been using Visual Studio 2010 as our baseline compiler since May 2014, which is 7 years old now, and has kept us with C# 4.

In those years, there have been four new versions of Visual Studio and three new versions of C#. It's time to move the baseline forwards.

Unless anyone raises any objections in the next week, we will shortly be moving to Visual Studio 2015 and C# 6 as the new baseline. If you do not have Visual Studio 2015 or 2017, you can download Visual Studio Community 2017 for free, and install it side-by-side with any other versions you already have.

Edit 2017-05-11: Corrected new version of C# to 6.

#2 User is offline   Eldorado.Railroad 

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Posted 10 May 2017 - 06:03 PM

Open Rails uses XNA 3.1, which only really needs Visual Studio 2008 to compile.

Yeah, Visual Studio 2010 is..."old"...all relative really. If you are trying to encourage new developers to come to Open Rails, "moving the goal post" might not be the way to do it. Certainly not now, perhaps in a few years. If I am wrong and a deluge of new developers are "champing at the bit " to be in Open Rails with Visual Studio 2015/2017, I stand rebuffed.

Likewise, if the principals are planning to move to another platform, other than XNA 3.1, I would outline what the plan is to do so and on what time schedule. Again, the move to yet another compiler suite would be premature until more than the basics are in place to run what we can run now with Open Rails.

For someone such as yourself, I can see that the cutting edge requires that you have the latest tools, employers may demand that. But Open Rails in its present form does not require it. My guess is that you would like to not have to deal with a multitude of IDEs. I understand that, but that is also the reason for having several machines and OS versions. Yes, it castrates the portability, by requiring more hardware, but it maintains the current development platform for the rest of us. I complained back in the day when Open Rails was moved to Visual Studio 2010. If there was a sudden surge in development because Visual Studio 2010 was used instead of 2008, as in, a much greater number of personnel climbing onboard compiling code for Open Rails I would have agreed with the change. As things stand right now, we are trying to recruit more software developers, yet the plan is to yet again change the tools to compile the code.

Some other considerations might be in order. Maybe it is time to place a posting that asks, what IDE would you prefer to compile/contribute Open Rails with, and make you decision on that basis? The answer might surprise both of us!

Thanks!
Steve

#3 User is offline   Csantucci 

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Posted 11 May 2017 - 12:34 AM

Hi James,
I'm trying to download the 2017 pack. A window appears where I can select what components I desire (Development of apps for UWP, development of desktop applications for C++ etc). As I don't have so much disk space, can you please tell me which components I have to select?

#4 User is offline   cjakeman 

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Posted 11 May 2017 - 10:03 AM

View PostEldorado.Railroad, on 10 May 2017 - 06:03 PM, said:

I complained back in the day when Open Rails was moved to Visual Studio 2010.

We're leaving behind Visual Studio 2010/12/13 and C# v4. Is this going to cause you any problems, Steve?

There will be benefits. An item on our roadmap which will help to bring in new developers is a switch of source code control from the old SVN to the widely adopted Git. As well as supporting newer versions of C#, VS 2015/17 has a built-in user interface for Git which is likely to be easier for newcomers (and for us too) than using a separate SVN program as we currently do.

Hope that makes sense,

#5 User is offline   James Ross 

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Posted 11 May 2017 - 11:05 AM

View PostEldorado.Railroad, on 10 May 2017 - 06:03 PM, said:

My guess is that you would like to not have to deal with a multitude of IDEs.

This is incorrect - supporting multiple IDEs has not caused us any problems; what has caused us real problems is supporting old IDEs. We have had people submit C# 6 code and that breaks the automatic build and other people's builds because they're all expecting C# 4.

View PostCsantucci, on 11 May 2017 - 12:34 AM, said:

I'm trying to download the 2017 pack. A window appears where I can select what components I desire (Development of apps for UWP, development of desktop applications for C++ etc). As I don't have so much disk space, can you please tell me which components I have to select?

To build Open Rails with Visual Studio 2017, you need to select Windows > .NET desktop development. That is it.

#6 User is offline   roeter 

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Posted 11 May 2017 - 11:39 AM

I'm not so keen on changing horses while at full speed - and at the moment I'm in the last phase of a very extensive update for timetable / signalling as detailed in the series of blueprints. All code is in place and I'm running the final tests.
Can I still submit that without yet changing to VS 2017 - I'd rather make that changeover 'in peace', while I'm not trying to sort out any other problems.
Knowing MS it's likely that commands and what have you may all just be a little different, and don't fancy having to sort that out while trying to get things running. It would probably delay progress - and that carries the risk that someone submits changes to the code which I have worked on, which all means extra work.

Just to give you an idea of the size of this work : 25 source files have been modified, and 5 have been added.

Regards,
Rob Roeterdink

#7 User is offline   James Ross 

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Posted 11 May 2017 - 01:20 PM

View Postroeter, on 11 May 2017 - 11:39 AM, said:

Can I still submit that without yet changing to VS 2017 - I'd rather make that changeover 'in peace', while I'm not trying to sort out any other problems.

Compatibility with C# is excellent, so I would genuinely be surprised if there were any code problems should you switch to Visual Studio 2015/2017 right now; however, we're not going to break anything right away, so, if you'd prefer to continue with your current version, I'm happy to ensure we don't break it until you're ready.

#8 User is offline   Csantucci 

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Posted 12 May 2017 - 01:08 AM

I downloaded and installed it with no problems, apart to the fact that I got the version with the Italian menus...
Only thing I notice is that debugging seems to be much slower than with the previous version. It's annoying. Maybe there's some setting to increase execution speed by reducing new debug features?

To later use git do I need to create an account on Visual Studio?

#9 User is offline   cjakeman 

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Posted 12 May 2017 - 08:28 AM

View PostJames Ross, on 11 May 2017 - 11:05 AM, said:

To build Open Rails with Visual Studio 2017, you need to select Windows > .NET desktop development. That is it.

Thanks.

I've added that to the notes on the website at http://openrails.org...eveloping-code/

#10 User is offline   James Ross 

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Posted 12 May 2017 - 01:02 PM

View PostCsantucci, on 12 May 2017 - 01:08 AM, said:

Only thing I notice is that debugging seems to be much slower than with the previous version. It's annoying. Maybe there's some setting to increase execution speed by reducing new debug features?

That's very confusing - I have no idea what might causing something like that. Can you give a concrete example of something which is "much slower", and what version are you comparing with?

View PostCsantucci, on 12 May 2017 - 01:08 AM, said:

To later use git do I need to create an account on Visual Studio?

According to the documentation, you may need to create an account to keep using the Community edition past 30 days, but no individual features are restricted (except online services which already need accounts, like Visual Studio Team Services, none of which we'll be using). I'm not sure if the 30 day thing is true, but do let us know if anything expires after 30 days.

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