Microsoft Officially Releases Visual Studio 2015 and .NET 4.6
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rjmarvin writes: Microsoft has announced RTM of Visual Studio 2015, the latest version of its flagship IDE, along with the release of .NET 4.6. The release includes a new set of DevOps services featuring the Build vNext cross-platform build service, the IntelliTest automated unit testing tool, and a Dev/Test service delivered both via the cloud in Visual Studio Online and on-premises through Team Foundation Server. Soma Somasegar, corporate vice president of the developer division at Microsoft, highlighted three main themes Microsoft focused on with VS 2015 in an interview with SD Times: developer productivity, "a holistic set of DevOps services" and giving developers choices when it comes to tooling toward the goal of building Universal Windows Apps for Windows 10. VS 2015 and .NET 4.6 are available here.
Comment removed (Score:4, Funny)
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The good news is you can totally continue coding your l33t scripts in Notepad, just like before, and leave the professional tools to the grownups.
Re:im sure the meeting was interesting (Score:4, Insightful)
you don't see the huge time savings seasoned developers will get with the new features.....It could cost $2000 more per license and it would still pay for itself within a year.
Really? Which features are you thinking will be worth that much? The improved Azure integration? The slick Agile planning tools? The brand new XAML editor?
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It's a no-brainer for me, not sure what the sour grapes are about:
First class npm/bower/grunt support,
Cross-platform development
In-memory database support
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- Live GUI changes alone can cut down the GUI dev time by about 25%.
- The debugger time line will reduce the time required to debug
- The H/W resource tracking will make quick work of optimizing application or at least finding the culprit.
- The testing tools have been improved to significantly reduce the time required to create test procedures and run them
This is just a small list of things that have been improved.
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Was 20 years not enough for you to template the production of a new library, introduce DSLs, make your shit data-driven, and design it around sensible layers?
Just how long has your company paid you to maintain that Windows 3.1 app?
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Well...
with you on the phone
the tablet is successful and well reviewed (I'm typing from one now and love it).
xbone makes money but I agree it hasn't been as successful as 360
they reduced prices on visual studio.
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they reduced prices on visual studio.
Actually, they raised the price.
.NET 4.6 with visual studio .
Professional retail without MSDN is now gone, so say goodbye to the $299 non-msdn upgrade version. This was the most used edition for companies needing software development tools but not being software-only houses.
Express edition? Gone. The community edition gives some leeway, but most of those companies won't be able to use it since they have turnover beyond $1mil. Meaning, no more free development for
Re:im sure the meeting was interesting (Score:5, Insightful)
> no more free development for .NET 4.6 with visual studio
Community supports the vast majority of useful features... and really, what's the problem with it costing money if you want more than 5 developers or have a $1M+ turnover company? You're still allowed Community if you're using it for classroom learning, academic research, or open-source development.
If you're working for a company that presumably makes money from writing software (in one way or another) is it really so bad to give some of that money to a company that helped you do that with their product? If you hire a developer, their salary is far more than the $1,119 it will cost you for VS Pro with MSDN ; do you really want to waste their time by making them write their code with a text editor and build it with just the .NET SDK tools?
I usually prefer SharpDevelop for my .NET dev but I've not done any in a long time - I'd be inclined to give Visual Studio a go, even if I've found it's prior iterations to be far too handholding and patriarchal.
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Wrong. Read bullet-point "5" at the bottom of this page:
https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/products/vs-2015-product-editions.aspx [visualstudio.com]
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Meaning, no more free development for .NET 4.6 with visual studio.
But that's rubbish, it's only "no more free development" if you are a company turning over more than $1 million dollars a year (assuming you're also not using it for academic research/teaching or OSS).
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"xbone makes money but I agree it hasn't been as successful as 360"
Depends what you mean by not as successful, certainly they've sold more X1's than they had X360s at the same point in their lifecycles.
The problem is more that the PS4 is doing even better again.
So the X1 is doing better than the 360 did when comparing unit sales, but worse than the 360 did when compared to it's competition.
Universal WindowsApps .. (Score:1)
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There is a way they can increase adoption of the windows phone.
1 year of free service on your contract if you will take a windows phone.
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Hmmm, I threw down $400 on a Nokia 830 (Windows 8.1) several months ago and don't regret my purchase. You can stick to your iPhone you stupid weenie.
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Windows 10 Mobile edition will be released later this year. Universal apps will run on any device that is running any flavor of Windows 10.
Release . . . the Kraaken! (Score:2)
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remember java phones?
Re: Universal WindowsApps .. (Score:2)
Bad comparison. Windows 10 universal apps support responsive design, like many web apps (but with native speed and access to device/platform capabilities).
Java apps, as it appears, didn't support any kind of design.
.NET patches = job security (Score:2)
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Actually the strategy is go get rid of "patch Tuesday" [gizmodo.com] Now your systems will get hosed like uhm, whenever.
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Companies won't adopt 10 in large groups for quite awhile. That coupled with zero day vuln's which are bound to happen, it'll be patch Tuesday every day! Don't forget a brand new browser too.. After all today MS15-078 [microsoft.com] another zero day, critical was released out of band. Let chaos reign.
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Corporate PCs don't use Patch Tuesday. They get all the patches and the PCs update themselves from WSUS or other software update mechanism.
Only home PCs update themselves willy-nilly. Corporate PCs have had the ability to sch
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Another version of .NET means update times get increased again. Christ all fucking mighty, Windows has become a dog.
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Re: .NET patches = job security (Score:2)
facepalm. Yes older versions will get updates, but if you're running newer versions your won't get the patches for the older versions. How hard is it to understand?
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I still get updates for older versions of .NET, even though I have newer ones installed.
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Yes. Older major versions. Not older point versions of the same major version.
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How hard is it to understand?
Two words: legacy applications.
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Ugh. You CANNOT have more than one 4.x version of .net installed. If you install 4.6 then 4.5 is UNINSTALLED. therefore no increase in patches.
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The you're in the wrong freaking thread. This one is discussing whether or not update times are increased by adding a new point-version of .net (clue: it doesn't). This isn't a major release, so you're completely off-topic. Well done.
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No. I was responding to mightyMartian.troll.
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Nope. You responded to my comment to an AC responding to mightMartain.troll. Hence, you hijacked my thread.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=7713693&threshold=-1&commentsort=0&mode=thread&cid=50148259 [slashdot.org]
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Yeah and that AC was responding to MM'S post about increased update times:
http://slashdot.org/comments.p... [slashdot.org]
Which was marked as insightful insightful even though it's patently false.
So at that point my comment was on-topic and yours are still way off.
So basically you don't understand two things:
1) that .net point-version updates are in-place, overwrite previous point versions of that major release, and don't increase update times, and...
2) how to follow thread ancestry on Slashdot.
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not wrong. the post i was replying to was this:
> Another version of .NET means update times get increased again
which is wrong.
since 4.6 REPLACES 4.5, there's no additional patches to install.
ongoing, you either install the 4.5 patches, OR the 4.6 ones. not both.
i feel sorry for whoever hired you that you still don't understand that, and you're supposedly responsible for so many systems. and what's worse, i have explained it to you several times and you still refuse (probably out of some ignorant pride) t
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Microsoft routinely releases patches for various versions (1.x through 4.x) of .NET that are installed on your system.
So funny to think about it. (Score:2)
In Windows 8 it slapped a six inch phone UI based on touch on a full fledged 28 inch desktop/laptop screen. Again a fiasco.
It used to talk about "multi-platform support", w
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Now it talks about Universal Apps. But it is only Universal "Windows" Apps.
Actually they are called Universal Windows Platform apps. Everybody abbreviates it to universal apps, but at no time has Microsoft pretended to support any non-Windows OS.
The "universal" part is describing device categories. UWP apps will run on any Windows 10 device, including Raspberry Pi and other IoT devices, phones, tablets, business desktops, gaming PCs, Xbox One, Surface Hub, and HoloLens.
(They actually are supporting Linux and Mac with the newest ASP.NET, and even open sourced .NET Core which also
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IoT on a Windons device? That's absurd. Well, maybe not, the IoT term is being used for all sorts of gibberish. Raspberry Pi itself is almost a bit too big for me to call it IoT even if it is a thing and networked. An IoT device is not supposed to be an interactive consumer gadget.
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UWP apps will run on any Windows 10 device, including [...] Xbox One
Will UWP developer licenses become available without charge for Xbox One the way they are for Windows [microsoft.com]?
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I don't think they've said, but a few articles have suggested there will be one unified store. That could indicate there will only be one developer license.
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The story here is that most people just read the 3 words on a box and assume they understand. If a company goes out of their way to hide the truth then shame on them, but if you as a consumer don't take 5 minutes to go online and figure out if a product is fitting or delivering on the merchandise then shame on you.
Personally, I'm far more concerned with my tax dollars being messed with (And there's a whole lot of that going on) because I can't control that. My purchasing decisions are still in my control as
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I don't think emacs belongs in your list. emacs would be a great IDE if only it had a decent text editor.
Viper, the decent text editor for Emacs (Score:2)
emacs would be a great IDE if only it had a decent text editor
Does Viper [emacswiki.org] count?
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I use ,Net scaling features for the other direction, WPF apps that are easier for older eyes.
Uniform scaling for forms that aren't 1080 size is very much appreciated by those that want/need it.
And it's trivial to add to WPF forms. And fully independent scaling (user selected rather than resizing by dragging) is also easy as it is simple to add scroll bars to an application. I haven't done this yet but looked into it.
It's also a fantastic demo moment (everyone with imperfect eyes goes "Ohhh!").
The only peo
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> copy and paste from your other code?
If you worked for me, "sexconker", you would be FIRED right now.
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Ah! It's nice to know who to blame! :)
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Sounds like the PEBKAC to me.
Android, clang, and Linux support (Score:5, Informative)
I am surprised no one has mentioned clang or Android support. If you install mobile it will even install Chrome. No you did not misread that folks
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This is the first VS I have been actually excited about since about 2002. For those very reasons. The release management stuff looks interesting. Could be interesting to see how it compares to things such as puppet. That and the free plugin for python/pypy with good popups.
No one also mentioned pro is basically what they give away now either.
Everyone seems to want to talk about something else these days I guess.
This is a full featured IDE (one of the better ones out there) and they are giving it away fo
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Does it run on my Linux desktop?
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Chrome offers easy android emulated device support. Press F12, choose emulation tab, and pick a device or set your own resolutions. This is likely why it is included. In fact, the project I'm working on now is exactly how we're testing our builds at the moment. Mixing in a bit of actual device testing, but until I get some new hardware that is limited.
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I've never had a problem with this. Perhaps your workflow is sub-optimal?
Re: Have they fixed it so 2 devs can work together (Score:2)
Or, you could just BC...
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Apparently, you've never used a code repository or worked on a team of developers. (No, not even CVS, since even that handles this scenario correctly.)
Let me give you a big-boy-coder lesson. When you work on a team with other people, you have to make changes to the same files as other developers at the same time as they're making changes to them. When you commit your changes, there may be conflicts with the other changes that other developers have made. A "diff tool" is probably the most basic way to determ
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The problem is the makefile is XML, which can be ordered without losing any information. The diff tool is likely line-by-line. Therefore, there are "conflicts" because the file is reordered separately on two machines.
Re:Have they fixed it so 2 devs can work together? (Score:5, Insightful)
You do need special considerations for XML files though - there are several solutions
The weakest solution is to rely on the ability of the target user to spot diffs and correctly merge XML files. And also not to use automatic merging, ever, because the nature of XML files means that conflicting changes may not occur in adjacent lines.
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The next (and inadequate) solution is to order the XML consistently - you can do this in your diff tool, or you can write your tools to produce a reliably ordered file in the first place.
Many tools that work on XML files exhibit what I call "juggling" - the elements and attributes change order when you change the value of them or their siblings, because the software is directly using the DOM to manipulate the file - and does this by creating new objects and removing the old ones from the collection. This is a real PITA for text-based diff tools because not all the changes will even conflict with each other (element sequences are often spread across multiple lines, more so if you put attributes on their own line to enhance the ability to merge).
So, you can either write your code to write a consistent order - usually by serializing a fresh XML stream from a model when you write the file.
Or you can add a layer that re-orders the document when you diff it - many of the available diff tools will let you do this. For some files, I used to write an XSLT sheet (to re-order elements consistently). For attributes, I wrote an extra option for Tidy [w3.org] that sorts attributes - doing that plus laying them out on separate lines is sufficient for many files. I've gone as far as writing custom tools that unpack HTML written into an attribute (with all the escape sequences that entails) into a CDATA section for clarity, runs it through Tidy, and then repacks everything after you're done.
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Intermediate : I've thought of taking this a step further and converting the XML to a directory tree of text files designed to merge well, principally to make things clearer for end-users who currently have the kind of diff-tool-plus-converter described above but still occasionally make merge errors.
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The next step is to write tools to specifically diff your model. This is probably a bridge too far for most developers, because we have the kind of brain that can abstract a text representation of the model and map it to the actual model that will be created. For end users, it may well be advisable.
Diff / merge tools are a field that need more work - currently the main users are developers who can cope with them being a bit immature. But we will increasingly see collaborative tools based on the kinds of version control that we take for granted, and normal users will need to be able to do this stuff too.
Not too bad, we will see what sticks... (Score:5, Interesting)
To be honest, I'd couldn't have seen even half of the stuff that they shipped every being there when Visual Studio 2013 came out. An Android emulator? Okay. Upcoming Objective-C support? Hum.
It's a big bet that there is enough demand for better cross-platform code sharing for people to start using the Xamarin environment, and it's even a bigger bet that mobile developers will want to bring iOS and Android applications onto Windows.
There is some method to the madness. The Windows Runtime (the engine underneath Universal Apps) and the Core CLR have some compelling technologies that may have appeal outside the Windows ecosystem.
The Windows Runtime is interesting. It is almost completely oriented around asynchronous APIs. Any operation that will (or can) take more than about 50-100 milliseconds will need to have an asynchronous form. Now, the trick is that async/await in C#, promises in JavaScript and Futures in C++ makes consuming that API tolerable (in C#, it's really not hard at all). It is oriented completely around try to make sure that applications can't block and become unresponsive. In short, if you make it harder to do the wrong thing, it will happen less often.
But, the first form was oriented only towards Modern (metro) applications, and we all know how that turned out. The Universal Apps is doubling down on the underlying runtime and support and seeing if they can get better adoption. Hard to say, but it'll be interesting to see how it turns out.
The other interesting front is Android; there's a bunch of libraries that provide alternatives to core Google APIs. I'm fine with that; alternatives are always good. And the Android subsystem in Windows 10, that's interesting.
Anyway, it may bring some hard-core Visual Studio shops into the mobile space, because you can still say "it's all VS". Lastly, it was a price drop. Ultimate doesn't exist anymore, and it's replacement is half the price. Even Premium was more expensive. I half expect more price drops and incentives to drive more people into the ecosystem.
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That async/await thing is one of those things that changes how you code. I've been fighting with threads and sync object for two decades in c++, and just love how easy it is now.
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Agreed. Once you understand how to use async/await, you realize how much easier it is than the old ways.
C++11 (Score:1, Insightful)
Visual Studio is now advertising partial but significant C++11 support, and they claim only 3 minor features of C++03 are missing.
Of course, this is quite far from the truth, as it is riddled with bugs and nothing really works, but at least they're trying.
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It's partial but significant, just as I said.
I already report bugs to them regularly, but there is only so much they can do: MSVC is built on completely inadequate technology after all. I tend to contact the developers directly, going through Microsoft Connect doesn't work very well.
Is it 64-bit yet? (Score:4, Interesting)
I didn't see anything useful on their page--have they made the bloody application 64-bit yet? We've had tonnes of problems with it crashing with extensions like Visual Assist and a couple custom plugins. The whole environment runs out of memory and brings everything attached down with it. It's pretty ridiculous.
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Sounds like the answer is "64 bit is hard work and we'd rather do other things + it'd break our plugins". Same issue everyone else faced when porting to 64 bit. And apparently it's easier to port code to run on the .NET VM than port it the old fashioned way whilst keeping it as unmanaged C++?
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It's certainly the case that they're taking up memory, but it's hard to help that. The tools teams are constantly working to make that stuff better, but sometimes you just need more memory. Even without visual assist running (I don't like it as much as my colleagues), VS has a 1.5GB memory footprint.
.Net, Longest Updates Ever! (Score:2)
Windows updates you can time with a calender.
Python Tools for Visual Studio (Score:5, Informative)
While we're at it, Python Tools for Visual Studio 2.2 [github.com] has also been released at the same time. In addition to VS 2015 support, this is mainly a bugfix and do-small-features-that-never-make-the-bar release. If you're a Python developer on Windows, please give it a try, especially if you've never heard about it before. Feel free to tell me that we suck so long as you also file a bug in the tracker. ~
(Full disclosure: I am a developer on the PTVS team.)
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Re:How sad (Score:5, Informative)
Oh really?
http://developers.slashdot.org... [slashdot.org]
http://developers.slashdot.org... [slashdot.org]
http://developers.slashdot.org... [slashdot.org]
http://developers.slashdot.org... [slashdot.org]
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LOL Darkain.
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Hmm. Nothing for VS 2008 or 2012. The attitude must by cyclic.
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Well, has it changed much. I read the summary above, and it was 100% gibberish. Honestly I understood nothing of what it said. Buzzwords and bullshit. All I know is that there's probably a new version. So, what's the difference between having no MS stories versus having unintelligible MS stories?
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Apparently, you missed the news from a while ago about Microsoft releasing the CLR under a free software license. Check it out [msdn.com].
I've been a Slashdot reader since back when it was called Chips & Dips. Back then, Microsoft deserved the M$ appellation. Today, not so much. They're cooperating a lot more with the libre software community. Now, you can either shake your fist at them and scream how they'll never be forgiven for their sins... or you can smile, extend a hand, and welcome them to the party.
Th
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I think you will find a lot of people here just want somebody to hate. MS has dropped proprietary platform-specific extensions in favor of chasing standards compliance, their big-ticket product MS Office is now available on Linux with Office365 (and native apps on OS X, iOS and Android), they're soliciting and responding to feedback from the community (Windows Insider and XBox kinect, back compat and internet connectivity) and they are releasing a lot of open source software along with the patent promise.
Th
10 LET M$ = "Microsoft" (Score:3)
Microsoft got its start as a publisher of BASIC interpreters and continues to maintain Visual Basic. In the line-number era, before DEFSTR and DIM...AS statements, all string variable names in BASIC ended in a dollar sign. For example, this was valid code:
In addition, comment subjects on Slashdot are limited to 50 characters, and M$ saves seven.
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I was around when the M$ nickname got coined.
It was a shortening of Micro$oft. We did the same thing with the Compuserve Information Service (CIS), which charged such outrageous rates that we started calling them CI$. Replacing the "s" of rapacious firms with "$" was pretty much standard practice then -- and, at that time, nobody deserved it more than Microsoft.
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Dafuq?
"At my current job, we use Visual Studio to write web services in C#. The experience has shocked me."
What is wrong with it, or more likely: what are you doing wrong?
"the 260-character limit of path & file names"
That's a filesystem limitation, not a VS issue. But what on earth are you doing that requires anything that long in a Web Service? Are we talking old SOAP web services or modern REST/Web API services?
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I use it for C#/MVC/WebAPI(REST) business apps. No node.js or python at work, although I do play with it outside of my work tasks.
Yes, if you're still using VS2010 I bet you're running into some issues.
One thing you might try is to make a \Code or \Source directory and move your projects there, rather than in \My Docs\VS\Projects - that does add a lot of unnecessary characters to the path name.
Very glad I'm working for a company that doesn't sit on it's hands with Visual Studio. Already have VS2015 installe