Rating: 
Summary: Stick with Visual C++ 6.0
Review: Absolute and total crap. Try and compile any of your programs with and you will see the following error:D4029 : optimization is not available in the standard edition compiler That's right, Visual C++ .NET Standard Edition performs absolutely NO OPTIMIZATION. My DirectDraw went from rendering more than 100 FPS to *17* FPS. I have never been so pissed off in my life, I have just blown $100.00 for NOTHING. What's worse, you can not buy just Visual C++ .NET Professional Edition. To get an optimizing C++ .NET compiler, you have to buy *ALL* of Visual Studio .NET (it will only put you back a cool grand). CRAP, TOTAL CRAP, STICK WITH VISUAL C++ 6.0 STANDARD EDITION
Rating:
Summary: An overwhelmed beginner C++ programmer
Review: After starting out learning on Bloodshed Development's free C++ development suite, I bought Microsoft C++.NET in hopes of finding it easier to understand. Now I am totally confused!
The resources (wall charts) included with the software look pretty when tacked on the wall of my workroom, but they have done little to help me create any useful applications.
If you are new to working with C++ (or programming in general) you will find that Microsoft increases the learning curve dramatically with this product. Find something less complex.
Rating:
Summary: Stick with Visual C++ 6.0
Review: I got the free evaluation of Visual Studio .net 2003 and couldn't believe how much the product has gone downhill in the last few versions. Microsoft is definately in the business of bloatware! The program hogs up about 4GB on your harddrive, reconfiguring and corrupting your whole operating system so nothing works well ever again. Nevertheless, I kept trying to work with .net. I've been programming C++ for Windows for a long time. I was expecting new features to help me make better programs, but found just the opposite to be true. After doing a lot of reading and banging my head against the wall, I finally realized that the only new features .net has to offer are: 1) A giant overhead of automatic functions ("managed C++") that slow down the performance and increase the size of programs you make, but they allow sloppy Microsoft programmers to slap together messy code that doesn't crash as much. (I for one don't write programs that crash, because I can manage my own memory, thank you very much!) You are forced into proprietary language syntax, a total departure from standard C++, so that your eventual switch to Linux or whatever else will be difficult or impossible (hopes Microsoft). 2) Support for using multiple programming langauges in projects (forcing you to learn thousands of things from all the other inferior languages that you never wanted to mess with, just so you can make a simple program that shows a dialog box on the screen, for example). 3) A big push to develop "software as a service", with a plethora of difficult and cumbersome new tools that you are forced to use in order to build software that only works with an internet connection, helping Microsoft obtain world domination at last. Because these features attempt to take me in a different direction than I want to go, I'm looking to use something else. I encourage you to do the same.
Rating:
Summary: Megasloth keeps getting crappier
Review: I got the free evaluation of Visual Studio .net 2003 and couldn't believe how much the product has gone downhill in the last few versions. Microsoft is definately in the business of bloatware! The program hogs up about 4GB on your harddrive, reconfiguring and corrupting your whole operating system so nothing works well ever again. Nevertheless, I kept trying to work with .net. I've been programming C++ for Windows for a long time. I was expecting new features to help me make better programs, but found just the opposite to be true. After doing a lot of reading and banging my head against the wall, I finally realized that the only new features .net has to offer are: 1) A giant overhead of automatic functions ("managed C++") that slow down the performance and increase the size of programs you make, but they allow sloppy Microsoft programmers to slap together messy code that doesn't crash as much. (I for one don't write programs that crash, because I can manage my own memory, thank you very much!) You are forced into proprietary language syntax, a total departure from standard C++, so that your eventual switch to Linux or whatever else will be difficult or impossible (hopes Microsoft). 2) Support for using multiple programming langauges in projects (forcing you to learn thousands of things from all the other inferior languages that you never wanted to mess with, just so you can make a simple program that shows a dialog box on the screen, for example). 3) A big push to develop "software as a service", with a plethora of difficult and cumbersome new tools that you are forced to use in order to build software that only works with an internet connection, helping Microsoft obtain world domination at last. Because these features attempt to take me in a different direction than I want to go, I'm looking to use something else. I encourage you to do the same.
Rating: 
Summary: Optimizing Compiler is available!!
Review: I have been researching this product after reading some disturbing reviews here. The standard edition does not come with the code-optimization features. You can, however, download the 2003 toolkit - FOR FREE - which includes the Microsoft C/C++ Optimizing Compiler and Linker. This is the same compiler and linker that ships with Visual Studio .NET 2003 Professional! It can be downloaded here:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/visualc/vctoolkit2003/ The new compiler moves toward ISO conformance. So this version of VC++ is actually more standardized than previous versions. This can be helpful when porting applications to other standardized environments and compilers. I program mostly 3D graphics and have experienced a frame rate increase since downloading the toolkit. This new version is helpful when working on large group projects as well. Oh and the shader debugger is a plus when writing vertex and pixel shaders.
Rating:
Summary: This product is not practical for any type of development.
Review: I've been writing an OpenGL engine for a while now, and decided to make the step up from VC6 to .net in order to continue development. I was already quite adjusted to the interface since I'd been using it for about 6 months where I was previously employed. That said, I'm not a fan of the new interface, having spent so much time adjusting myself to VC5/6. I've got quite a few pet peeves with it (like alt+F7 no longer bringing up project settings even with the VC6 keyboard layout), but that is not my main problem with the product... (obviously, or I would not have ordered it anyway) Once it arrived, I decided to do some benchmarking to compare performance of builds between VC6 and vc.net. I made a build of my engine to arbitrarily do 500 box-triangle collisions against level geometry per frame, figuring that would be a good way of averaging things out since it's completely cpu-based (and largely dependant on compiler optimizations). I was a bit shocked by the results. My VC6 build maintained a consant 40+ FPS on my p3 1ghz, while using the exact same code and assets, the vc.net build stayed at around 15-20fps. I fiddled with the project settings for a while, but concluded this speed loss was due the lack of compiler optimizations in vc.net standard. Which means there isn't a darn thing I can do about it. Oh, and no, I didn't do something silly like test a release build against a debug build. I made sure the project settings for each build were as similar as possible. So, in conclusion, I've got no choice but to keep using vc6, and this was a great waste of 100 dollars. My advice is, if performance matters to you at all, don't buy this product. I was expecting to see some amount of performance loss due to the lack of "compiler optimizations", but this is completely absurd. The loss of performance makes this product completely unusable as a serious development platform. For serious development, you really have no choice but to go for a higher-priced development suite. Otherwise if you just want to fool around and performance isn't an issue, you might as well be using one of the many free compiler/IDE sets out there instead of blowing 100 dollars.
Rating:
Summary: Not a downgrade...
Review: If you've been using visual studio prior to .Net, .Net adds a lot of time saving features that really make it worth switching over. Some of the most prominent features include code completion, and the ability to put your code into sections that can be expanded or retracted for readability, which really helps for a project with a large codebase (Such as a senior computer science project for a bachelor's degree). Regardless of C++'s standing in the microsoft suite of programming tools, .Net is a good C++ ide.
Rating:
Summary: Not a downgrade...
Review: If you've been using visual studio prior to .Net, .Net adds a lot of time saving features that really make it worth switching over. Some of the most prominent features include code completion, and the ability to put your code into sections that can be expanded or retracted for readability, which really helps for a project with a large codebase (Such as a senior computer science project for a bachelor's degree). Regardless of C++'s standing in the microsoft suite of programming tools, .Net is a good C++ ide.
Rating:
Summary: Just want C++ equals not a Professional?
Review: In general, I'm pleased with this product. Although a number of people complain about the new IDE, it really isn't all that different. After 6 years of using 6.0 almost daily, I was worried about upgrade pains, but in one morning I was able to configure it to perform similarly to the old 6.0 interface, but with the added advantage that it does not crash every other compile. And finally, partial template specialization! No more iostream.h! What really annoys me, however, is the fact that this, the Standard Edition, does not include the optimizing compiler. Apparently, a REAL developer would not buy this product. Cleverly, Microsoft does not offer a C++ Professional edition that would include this feature, but be less than the outrageous $1000 ($500 upgrade) for the full studio. Like I want to write in Visual Basic .NET!
Rating:
Summary: Optimizing Compiler Please...
Review: Just a note to those thinking about replacing std compiler with the one coming from free Visual C++ Toolkit 2003... It's most likely NOT ok to build commercial apps with it. This is an excerpt from MS's EULA of C++ Toolkit:
"1.1 General License Grant. Microsoft grants to you as an individual, a personal, nonexclusive license to make and use copies of the Software (i) for your internal use; (ii) for designing, developing, testing and demonstrating your software product(s); and (iii) for evaluation of the Software"
For demonstration, not for sale. Well, afterall Toolkit is a free product.
If there was VC++ Professional edition, I'd swollow the fact that VC C++ Standard is useless. But there isn't and I'm forced to pay for the whole VStudio, that I will strip down to bare VC++...
BTW, it's less of a problem today, but instead of this mean & lean VC6 we got a sluggish and fat IDE, devoid of an old good code wizards (properties to the rescue, but they are not that convenient!).
Oh, and there's also comming new 'Express' edition of C++. That one on the other hand will have no resources editor, nor MFC & ATL libs.
Thank you Microsoft!
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