VisualStudio 2011 preview

[Mind Calamity]

just seen the new blue screen of death in the new windows sorry oft again

BSOD.jpg

Well, I'm glad it's still blue, now I can sleep peacefully at night

Also, the color and the message has improved

[betajaen]

:(

I don't like it. Then again, I can't see why BSODs are needed in these day and age.

[Mind Calamity]

I don't like it. Then again, I can't see why BSODs are needed in these day and age.

Maybe it's because MS Windows is still prone to viruses, even in it's latest and greatest edition (Win8), so if they fail, at least they look good at it.

(My opinion may be a little anti-Microsoft, but I don't believe I'm wrong. )

[betajaen]

I don't like it. Then again, I can't see why BSODs are needed in these day and age.

Maybe it's because MS Windows is still prone to viruses, even in it's latest and greatest edition (Win8), so if they fail, at least they look good at it.

(My opinion may be a little anti-Microsoft, but I don't believe I'm wrong. )

So does OSX, Linux, AmigaOS, BeOS and so on.

The blue screens are just for serious errors; driver fails, missing core files, etc.. But in this day and age, there is no reason why it can't fail gracefully and continue on with an alternative.

I also find the smilie face annoying, and a quite unprofessional of Microsoft. No doubt that will be removed on the final release.

[Kojack]

BSOD can be handy, it can give a clue as to what caused it (most of mine in the past were from nvidia dlls).
Plus they are better than the black reboot of death (doing something or playing a game when suddenly the screen goes black for a second or 2, then the bios memory check appears).

For some rather annoying news on windows 8's metro interface: http://www.techspot.com/news/45538-wind ... usive.html
(Short story: metro apps must be certified by ms and can only be installed via the windows store, with ms taking a 30% cut. Normal win32 apps will work the way they always have)

[Klaim]

I think the crash logos of Chrome did inspire a lot of crash behaviour implementations those last years...

[betajaen]

BSOD can be handy, it can give a clue as to what caused it (most of mine in the past were from nvidia dlls).
Plus they are better than the black reboot of death (doing something or playing a game when suddenly the screen goes black for a second or 2, then the bios memory check appears).

Thing is; They don't need to reset, or freeze. It can just recover from the error and continue. Once Windows has loaded, or resumed. It can go into a special mode such as safe mode, then give the user all the information why it crashed and given suggestions on where to go for help, or better still do it automatically through Windows Update.

To a lot of people; a BSOD is pretty much the end of the computer to them. They would have to take it back to the shop, or use expensive phone help services to get it working again. Letting the computer fix itself would make it far more friendly and less dreadful if anything serious goes wrong.

[Zonder]

To a lot of people; a BSOD is pretty much the end of the computer to them. They would have to take it back to the shop, or use expensive phone help services to get it working again. Letting the computer fix itself would make it far more friendly and less dreadful if anything serious goes wrong.

If you are getting that screen then somthing is serious going on and it's the kernal or a driver that has failed I wouldn't expect a normal user to be able to debug it so thats why the introduced the system restore feature. Most blue screens in recent years have been caused by nvidea (thats from our microsoft representative for the company I work at)

[Mind Calamity]

Either that, or some glutton is eating your memory like crazy, and causes your OS to crash (like it happened to me a few days ago), which basically proves that anti viruses are essential to the Windows environment (I was too lazy to do a clean reinstall, so Kaspersky trial did the clean up job for me).

Linux and Mac aren't vulnerable to viruses (at least not as much as Windows is), so crashes because of that are out of the question.

But, hey guys, I think we're missing the title of this thread once again

[betajaen]

If you are getting that screen then somthing is serious going on and it's the kernal or a driver that has failed I wouldn't expect a normal user to be able to debug it so thats why the introduced the system restore feature. Most blue screens in recent years have been caused by nvidea (thats from our microsoft representative for the company I work at)

Well how hard is it to for Windows; Make a note to not to load that driver on boot, then reboot? Windows automatically comes with fallback drivers for graphics cards, surely it's quite easy to swap them around on boot. Boot into Windows, load up Windows Update, then get the latest stable driver.

What I'm getting at here is; At this day of age, with the processing power, wealth of software available and the internet. There is no reason why computers (software wise), can't repair themselves. Heck, when I installed Windows 7 the other month, I didn't even install any drivers. Windows did it for me.

BSODs are from an archaic time where such feats weren't possible, so in the OS had to dump as much information that a human could read on to the screen, in hope that they could fix it. There is no need for them anymore.

[Zonder]

If you are getting that screen then somthing is serious going on and it's the kernal or a driver that has failed I wouldn't expect a normal user to be able to debug it so thats why the introduced the system restore feature. Most blue screens in recent years have been caused by nvidea (thats from our microsoft representative for the company I work at)

Well how hard is it to for Windows; Make a note to not to load that driver on boot, then reboot? Windows automatically comes with fallback drivers for graphics cards, surely it's quite easy to swap them around on boot. Boot into Windows, load up Windows Update, then get the latest stable driver.

What I'm getting at here is; At this day of age, with the processing power, wealth of software available and the internet. There is no reason why computers (software wise), can't repair themselves. Heck, when I installed Windows 7 the other month, I didn't even install any drivers. Windows did it for me.

BSODs are from an archaic time where such feats weren't possible, so in the OS had to dump as much information that a human could read on to the screen, in hope that they could fix it. There is no need for them anymore.

If a driver caused the issue then replacing it with a stock driver on reboot should be possible.

Was just stating that the screen will always need to exist how can the kernal deal with HW faliures. They are actually removing the reasons it can show though for instance you never see this for a FAT32/NTFS errors anymore

[Kojack]

OS/X:


PSP:


VMWare:


Mac:


Amiga:


Linux:




For a personal one, here's the bsod I created for the Gameboy Advance engine I helped develop 9 years ago.

It used my high res text mode. I drew a custom font with each character (alphanumeric and punctuation) only 3x5 pixels. Each of those characters was stored in an 8x8 background tile. I then had 2 background layers active, with a 4 pixel horizontal pan on the second layer. By printing text to alternate layers, we could get fairly easy display of double the characters per line without needing pixel plotting stuff, just tiles.
(I miss my GBA coding days. We put some damn cool stuff in that engine. Fixed point vector math, verlet physics with rope simulation, phase shifted and pitch shifted positional audio, even my own sprite scripting language and VM. It's just not the same on modern devices like smart phones, things with entire operating systems and apis).

[syedhs]

Come to think about it, MS cannot be that stupid or incompetent.. Actually the new UI design (I believe) is the result of research blah blah, and this is supposed to be better than previous. BUT.. old habits is very hard to kill - think about the keyboard innovation. How many of you have seen (but totally hate it) the 'unusual' keyboard design or DVORAK keyboard which is supposed to be more ergonomic, doesn't hurt you hands spine etc, increate typing rate.. QWERTY keyboard was actually designed in 1870s for typewriter.. so probably by now you know the drills..

So in this case all parties are right, we from the 80s and 90s computer people are so used to the old interface - we cannot change to new layout without severing productivity for few months. M$ always invent new stuff (including new GUI) which is supposed to better the GUI experience, but in real experience, only new people may benefit because they don't have past experience and they can actually use the GUI without complaining at all... So all people are right actually.. he he

[EricB]

/me Breaks out his necroposting skills (sorry haven't been around the forums in a while)

i'll stick to vs2005, or codeblocks.

If it ain't broke don't fix it!

What if it get's old ? Will you not upgrade it either ?

Old, hmmm, C++ is ~30 years old, not much has changed even with the newest revision. The code i write in vs2005 still works in win8, I have very little likely hood of using anything that's new builds that i can't already do in vs2005, and the generate code will run what? 1% faster? Sorry, i'll stick to vs2005/vs2008 where the UI is clean, it's stable, and i know where everything is.

i'll stick to vs2005, or codeblocks.

If it ain't broke don't fix it!

We could use the same attitude when it comes to Windows 3.1

Actually windows 3.1 is still in use, entertainment centers in the backseats of 767s come to mind. Just because something is newer doesn't mean it's better or worth the upgrade. Hell, the space shuttle ran on 386s!

[JohnJ]

IMO the cluttered and toylike interface problem isn't just something Windows has, but actually the versions of Linux I've tried has been much worse. In Linux buttons and lists etc. seem to be padded with 10,000 miles between each item of actually useful information, it's really annoying. I know you can customize it, but the point here is that there seems to be some trend for fischer-price toy-like interfaces lately.

I think it might be partly because people are trying to find some universal middle-ground between tablets and PCs where the same applications (and interfaces) can work on both. That's doomed to failure though for productivity-critical software because touchscreens and mouse input are different enough to each benefit from fundamentally different UI designs, so any middle ground ends up being the worst of both worlds. The only benefit to some universal Windows "Metro" interface IMO is for extremely inexperienced users who aren't sufficiently coordinated with the mouse that it's basically the same to them as a touch screen anyway.

In any case it's up to the individual program it seems to provide a clean UI. For code editing I tend to hide toolbars etc. a lot because I want 95% of what I see to be code, not hundreds of toolbar icons that I only use 1% of the time anyway.

I haven't seen much of VS 2011 (I've also been working in unix environments recently) but I like what I see in screenshots like this: http://blogs.msdn.com/cfs-filesystemfil ... -BUILD.png

[Mind Calamity]

@JohnJ:


How about this ? I would love to see any version of Windows come close to the simplicity of Open/FluxBox or XFCE, heck I don't even have to use my keyboard to get to a website I frequent.

I really prefer Crunchbang/Any Linux over Windows, but since I'm too lazy to recompile everything (I haven't recompiled my libraries since 8 months ago...) I'm using Windows for now.

Most of the time, nothing good comes from eye-candy, that's mostly the reason why I hate KDE (4, 3 was good).

Also, I very much preferred KDevelop 4 over any version of VS, for some reason it compiled my OGRE applications way faster than Visual Studio can compile a simple "Hello World!" program (maybe gcc/g++ is to blame, but KDevelop was way more lightweight than VS too, so that's another plus).

[jacmoe]

Hate is such a strong word...

By the way: what KDE 4 version did you try?

KDE 3 was never good. Ever.
It was a toy. Fisher-Price like.
KDE 4.3 was crap.

That changed dramatically by KDE 4.4 ..
Thanks to Plasma I guess..

KDE 4.7 is slick.
And if you use classic menu: compact and efficient.
XFCE and Gnome really looks clunky in comparison.

[Kojack]

I would love to see any version of Windows come close to the simplicity of Open/FluxBox or XFCE, heck I don't even have to use my keyboard to get to a website I frequent

I got to this website without using a keyboard.

[Mind Calamity]

@Kojack: Damn I need to get some sleep...

But yeah, it's still much easier to left click right click and your browser opens (I don't like moving my mouse to the bottom of the screen ), still my previous point about OpenBox having an advantage over Windows just because of the mouse navigation is invalid, but it still is much, much faster than Windows has ever been.

Besides, Microsoft is really wary of their users, they don't let us/them customize anything apart from the windows' aero color.

@Jacmoe:
Yes, hate might not be the word I was looking for, but rather "don't prefer" would be more fit for what I was trying to express.

And yes, I haven't tried the newer versions of KDE 4.x, at the time I tried it it was still in it's beginnings, I didn't use KDE 3 all that much either, but it still was way faster than KDE 4 at the time.

To be honest, I prefer OpenBox over any desktop environment anytime, it's speed is IMO unmatched, while KDE and GNOME are much larger and more feature-rich.

[jacmoe]

I haven't tried the newer versions of KDE 4.x, at the time I tried it it was still in it's beginnings, I didn't use KDE 3 all that much either, but it still was way faster than KDE 4 at the time.

I am just pointing out that you haven't tried KDE then.
I've already pointed out that KDE 4.4 and onward is a totally different thing.

[KungFooMasta]

Hi Ogre community!

I recently installed the Windows 8 Developer Preview with the dev tools. Has anybody tried making a DirectX Metro application using Ogre? I've been mostly playing with XNA the past couple years so I've forgotten about native/managed C++. Would there need to be a new RenderSystem plugin created to work with the WDK (Windows Development Kit?)? Are there any issues mixing native and managed code together?

Sorry if these questions are really basic.

[Klaim]

I guess you should start by reading this? http://ogre3d.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=67913