Windows 7 Development Platform - c++

As some of you may have noticed, a few hours ago Microsoft released Windows 7 RTM to those of us with a Technet or MSDN subscription.
I unfortunately didn't have the opportunity time-wise to test the new OS. I'm asking of anyone who used it with Visual Studio 2008 during RC what was your experience? Did you feel the RC offered a stable environment for it? Did it behave well under Windows 7? In short, can I rely on Windows 7 as my soon-to-be development platform?
On another note, did anyone did any tests the new crt? What were the results?
EDIT: As an afterthought, I'm interested indeed in both 32bit and 64bit experiences, since the OS will go to just one of these machines.

x58 chipset and i7 processing unit, Windows 7 RC x64, I had a lot of issues with programs locking up and crashing (not responding, invoking windows "Ill find out whats wrong! .. not) when you try to close the form. It kills development time.
Especially visual studio 2008, countless crashes and lock ups or delays. It does run good most of the time, but it has its moments.
My experience is that its not 100% solid.
I thought that it was weird, because its built in the Vista SP1 core, and my hardware runs Vista very solid, no hitches -ever-.
And yes, it was a fresh install of Win7, not an upgrade. I'm installing Server R2 though, so I'll see how that works out! :D
edit
I couldn't put my finger on it. Under Vista SP1/SP2 it runs rock solid. The video drivers worked great however for my GTX295, motherboard BIOS is up to date.
I don't think that the problem was driver related per-se, but I can't say. The symptoms purely came across as a software related issue with the OS and how it handles the Windows.
The Event logs are not a help, because a generic form crashing doesn't produce any real detail for me to burn through and say "Ah ha!".
I must say though, it was mostly Visual Studio and forms run under the debugging host process. Anything else was pretty okay, so it could be more or less just a compatibility issue
edit
After a fresh install of Windows Server R2 RC, after the initial installation and a driver install for a wireless adapter, the system fails to boot up properly (or atleast "detects" an problem), so you have to manually tell it to boot Windows up normally, which works.
After doing some Windows updates, same thing, but this time the OS fails even when trying to boot up normally and just does a reboot (probably a blue screen, but surpressed by my BIOS)
My experience with R2 was blazingly fast, both in performance and a drop in satisfaction and warm fuzzies about it working good
It seems that either way you go, on the newest of new hardware, it has its issues. Bummer.

The best way to write Win7 compatible programs is to use Win7 as a development platform. I use Win7 x64 with Visual Studio 2008 almost half a year and it looks pretty stable and has some helpful features (e.g. snap). At this moment all my programs are ready for certification and compliant with all Win7 requirements. I use VirtualBox to test my programs in Windows XP/Vista environment and VirtualBox works without any problems on Win7 too.
My hardware is Intel Q6600 processor on ASUS P5KC motherboard. ATI video card was unstable until some build of drivers, now it works fine. NVidia video card has no problems all the way.

I've been using Visual Studio 2008 under the RC for a while now. No issues at all. For that matter, I don't remember having any under the Beta either.
Windows 7 is good to go for development, as far as I'm concerned.

We've been piloting Windows 7 internally for some time now and have had very few if any troubles with it. I've personally been using it with Visual Studio 2008 (Full and Express) and have been very pleased with the OS overall. I recommend it. (It is fair to note, however, that we use beefy hardware, generally dual or quad core, 4GB RAM and good video cards for our pilot).

I been using windows 7 (x86) for few month now, never had a single problem with that.
Visual Studio 2008, Adobe products, Netbeans and everything else running just fine.

Win7 RC1, VS 2008 SP1 here. The only issue so far is graphical glitches in drawing VisualSVN icons in the Solution Explorer if I scroll the projects tree using mouse wheel.
Also sometimes Tortoise SVN cache crushes. But it might not be related to Windows 7.

Related

Program compiled on Win7 crashes in XP (Visual C++ 6)

I have a rather large codebase that I've inherited and I'm kind of stuck in the past for the moment. I'm working in Visual C++ 6 in Windows 7 (32-bit), however, I'm targeting an XP machine (Service Pack 2). Corporate doesn't see the ROI of upgrading it to .NET and I've got about as much pull as a Mini Cooper towing a train.
With that said, I did seemingly successfully install VC++6 (without XP compatibility) on my Win7 machine and I can compile and run fine. However, when I try to deploy my release build to my XP machine, it crashes (while it does not crash on Win7). If, however, I build the same code on the XP machine directly, it'll work fine. Running VC++6 on my Win7 machine in XP compatibility mode crashes the IDE upon opening of my workspace.
The only thing I can possibly think of is that the code makes extensive use of ActiveX controls and the registry. I'm not sure if maybe there's some Win7 specific registry modifications that are being made or vice-versa. Then again, I know very little about the registry; I'm definitely much more comfortable working in a Unix environment when coding for pleasure, especially when I code in C/C++.
Here's a screenshot of the error I'm getting when it crashes. I'm imaging it's got something to do with ActiveX registration.
No, this isn't ActiveX related at all. This is you bog-standard, 1980's type assert. As you would have noticed, had you looked at winocc.cpp line 279.

Programming for Windows Phone 8 (and beyond) on GNU/ Linux

Since the VideoLAN programmers do write Windows 8/RT/Phone apps using Linux based operating systems and GCC I was wondering, whether there is some progress in regard to how to program for Windows in a Linux environment, where Windows is used only for testing. How easy/ hard is it, to program a Windows RT (modern UI whatever)/ Windows Phone 8 application on Linux?
I imagine a situation, where you use tools such as Git, Emacs/ VIM, GCC, Mono etc. to do the job. How about submitting the app without Visual Studio?
I ask, because Microsoft open-sourced so much stuff now, using Linux based OS for development could (should?) become feasible while developing apps for their systems. Does anybody have some behind the scenes information on this? It is very hard to find some relevant info.
Note I edited this question to be more "straight to the point"
Links:
This is the VLC Kickstarter page: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1061646928/vlc-for-the-new-windows-8-user-experience-metro
I'm a software engineer at Microsoft so I think I could give you some insights on this.
From a testing perspective, you should definitely have a Windows machine to test against. You can install Windows 8 as a VM using Virtual Box or something similar. You could also remote into a Windows machine if you have access to one.
Visual Studio can't be installed in Linux, as you know, but there are other C#/ASP.NET/etc. IDE's that you can use natively on Linux. Look into Wine for Linux: http://www.winehq.org/about/. It may help you somewhat.
As an aside, developing applications for Windows will be getting easier in the coming months. As was announce at MS Build, Microsoft is moving towards a universal app store that will make your app run on all Windows devices: PC, tablet, phone, and Xbox. This doesn't help with developing apps on Linux, but if you're a Windows developer, you might want to keep your eyes open about the new universal-style apps.

Programming on an ARM tablet

Not sure whether to ask this here or on SuperUser... so please migrate it if required.
I was recently gifted an Asus Vivo WinRT tablet by my boss and I was looking forward to having a little portable testing environment.
Unfortunately, it contains an ARM processor and, as far as I can see, there are no development tools that will run on it. Everything is x86/x64.
Is there anything I can use to develop on the actual tablet itself? If not .NET, then perhaps a C and/or C++ compiler? SQL even? Anything? I'm having heaps of trouble finding anything myself.
No, there is not. You'll need to use visual studio 2012 and create a windows store application. From there you can build your app and side load it to the tablet. There is a component you can install on rt that will enable you to debug the app as it runs on the tablet however, this comes with vs.
Most apps for any tablet are developed this way, as tablets usually less than ideal development machines.
The only way at the moment is to use remote desktop. use the RDP client on the RT slate to connect to a PC with visual studio installed.

What are some ways that I can develop C++ apps in Linux from a Windows workstation?

I'm developing C++ apps for Linux, but my workstation is Windows 7. I've read that Visual Studio is the strongest C++ IDE for Windows, but I actually want to execute the code on Ubuntu and be able to use a more graphically pleasing debugger than gdb, although the functionality of gdb is pretty good. I'm really happy with valgrind as well, but again, I'd like to be able to leverage that in an IDE in windows.
I currently use QtCreator as my C++ IDE and I edit the files over a samba mount to the linux box. I use Putty to run the Linux commands. I use git as my source control system, gcc as my compiler and cmake as my build system. I like QtCreator, but as I have it configured, I'm not taking advantage of code-completion or debugging.
The closest thing I've seen is CodeWarrior. It allows for executing code on remote embedded systems and a full debugger. Has anyone ever used this for general app development on Ubuntu?
Is QtCreator the right IDE for me? Is there something else that I can do to configure it so that it'll give me those rich IDE features that I'm looking for? Or should I look to another IDE? Also, are there some tools that I've neglected to mention that would make C++ development easier on a Linux box from a Windows workstation?
Thanks in advance...
It is not clear, you run QtCreator on windows?
If so, you can run QtCreator in Linux,
plus install nxserver on Linux,
and nxclient on windows (http://www.nomachine.com/).
So you run nxclient on windows, login to linux,
and work on linux, in compare with virtual machines,
you get more prefomance.
Use VirtualBox and linux virtual machines?
X Windows.
You could install Cygwin to run an X11 server on your Windows 7 desktop, then run an X11 graphical IDE like QtCreator on your Linux server that renders directly to your Cygwin Windows 7 desktop. I actually tried setting this up with Code::Blocks on openSUSE and Cygwin on Windows 7 just a few weeks ago because I'm in the same situation you're in. It works... kind of. There are weird intermittent errors.
Your scenario is exactly the scenario that the X Windows system was designed for, and it is awesome in concept, but the actual X11 protocol design and implementation is, I gather, old and pretty hairy. I have very little experience with X, but the people who do have lots of experience with it seem to complain about it a lot, and I suppose there are good reasons for that. Too bad, because it would be wonderful if there were a technology like X Windows that worked. AJAX is basically a cheap hack for solving the same kind of problem that X Windows tried to solve... running a remote application with local rendering of a rich GUI.
I gave up on X and I still do the same thing you do: I have putty and Samba-mounted files that I edit with Visual Studio. Visual Studio is the best text editor I've ever used. All the other Visual Studio IDE features are gravy.
There's some solutions :
VmWare : not free but really good
Virtualbox : free but less powerfull than VmWare
KVM/Qemu : Free but less powerfull than VmWare

Application crashing in WInXp and WIn2k3 but not in Vista or Win7 after applying KB981793 hot Fix from Microsoft

I have an existing application developed in VC++ 6.0 which has been installed in many customer sites throughout the world.
This application was working fine until sometime back when the Microsoft KB981793 hot fix was applied. This hotfix has changes related to Timezones and was crashing a crash due to an array overflow in our application code. When this patch was removed the application no longer crashed.
But the interesting thing is this crash was observed only in WinXP and Win2k3 machines and not in Vista or Win7 machines. Any reason why this works this way.
For XP and 2K3, Microsoft specifies minimum service pack levels as prerequisites. For Vista and 7 they don't require prerequisites even though service packs exist for Vista.
KB981793 for XP and 2003 touches Updspapi.dll, KB981793 for Vista or Windows 7 does not. This file is not related to timezones directly, but instead relates to the "setupAPI" (which includes device managament).