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I come from a land where the wheel was being reinvented on a daily basis, so to speak. A time when REAL programmers built their applications from scratch, and libraries (other than stdio) were for sissies! Just tell me which bits to flip to get which result and then get out of my way. Trust me I'm going somewhere with this.
Fast forward 30+ years and the hardest thing for me is to let go of that "Do it yourself" thing. So, I often find myself spinning my wheels to try and figure out how things are done.
So (because of my 30+ year "handicap"), here's what a typical scenario looks like. Suppose I wanted to write a client/server app for Windows. I would...
1. First I would think "Oh, no problem! I've been doing this type of things for years!".
2. I would proceed to start writing an HTTP daemon for the server side component using the winsock library, because "I don't need no stinking full-blown web server for this app".
3. I would write a rudimentary client app using sockets to establish the foundation of the communications piece.
4. Inevitably, I'll get stuck on some trivial thing, google for a solution, then find someone who has done all of the work that I've done so far, in VS, in like 10 clicks of the mouse.
It still happens to me sometimes but not quite so much anymore, as I have submitted my will (so to speak) to VS and let it do all of the dirty work for me while I glue everything together.
Microsoft and many who support them, has figured out not just the fact that everything that will be done has pretty much been done already, but has also figured out how to automate the creation of pretty much everything.
I used to gripe about these 20-somethings who crank out apps in VS, and have no idea what's going on under the covers. But I am quickly realizing that this really is the way to go. Fortunately for me, I have built almost every type of app from scratch, so I have a very good understanding of what's under the covers. It just took me this long to realize that this is not an excuse to continue building everything from scratch.
Anyway, I hope you can see how, coming from my perspective, Visual Studio is like the greatest thing since sliced bread. 
"Whenever I think of the past, it brings back so many memories." - Steven Wright
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And here I am doing the complete reverse. I started programming, using all the libraries microsoft gave me. Now I try to do everything myself because those generic libraries are never doing the exact thing I want them to do, or I simply wonder how to do it myself.
By now I use almost no 3rd party libraries and instead build everything from scratch.
I found my way.
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EveryNameIsTakenEvenThisOne wrote: By now I use almost no 3rd party libraries and instead build everything from scratch.
I think it helps to do that sometimes. If you have good working knowledge of the lower layers of software, then I believe that you will be able to produce more reliable products. I think the trick is to use the automation to do the majority of the work, then tweak the parts that don't quite "cut it". That seems to be the best balance for me anyway.
On the other hand, you have different fingers. - Steven Wright
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Yes, there is that bloat problem to deal with.
#SupportHeForShe
Government can give you nothing but what it takes from somebody else. A government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take everything you've got, including your freedom.-Ezra Taft Benson
You must accept 1 of 2 basic premises: Either we are alone in the universe or we are not alone. Either way, the implications are staggering!-Wernher von Braun
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You were already doing that to some degree in your 30 years. I notice that you mentioned using the winsock library. If you were true-to-form, you would have written that yourself, as well.
So, welcome aboard and thanks for sacrificing your NIH-itis to the Byte-God.  
#SupportHeForShe
Government can give you nothing but what it takes from somebody else. A government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take everything you've got, including your freedom.-Ezra Taft Benson
You must accept 1 of 2 basic premises: Either we are alone in the universe or we are not alone. Either way, the implications are staggering!-Wernher von Braun
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Most of that isn;t VS - it's the frameworks that VS supports and makes it easy for you to use: You would get the same libraries and functions using Notepad and a manual compilation - there are those that develop C# apps that way, though I'm not one of them.
But I came from the same roots as you - my first "real" job was assembly code (Z80) for Visual Display Terminals, so we did everything ourselves. But I learned the value of a library of tested, working, generic code that I could "plug in" to my applications, and the current .NET framework is the same thing though on a much larger scale!
And VS is indeed awesome! The best IDE I've ever met - I would have killed for the debugger alone back in the day! 
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
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Atom[^] is pretty good too.
#SupportHeForShe
Government can give you nothing but what it takes from somebody else. A government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take everything you've got, including your freedom.-Ezra Taft Benson
You must accept 1 of 2 basic premises: Either we are alone in the universe or we are not alone. Either way, the implications are staggering!-Wernher von Braun
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Atom is nice (the Visual Studio Code itself is based on its shell), but it's miles away from Visual Studio...
Also I'm a very old user of Notepad++ so atom, sublime, etc. are never my first choice.
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It's not meant to be a comparison to VStudio.
It's more like Notepad++, except I think NPP doesn't have the notion of looking at the directory as a project...
I like notepad++, and use it daily for simple editing tasks
#SupportHeForShe
Government can give you nothing but what it takes from somebody else. A government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take everything you've got, including your freedom.-Ezra Taft Benson
You must accept 1 of 2 basic premises: Either we are alone in the universe or we are not alone. Either way, the implications are staggering!-Wernher von Braun
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OriginalGriff wrote: But I learned the value of a library of tested, working, generic code that I could "plug in" to my applications
Yeah I would write my own library and then take it with me from job to job. At the time it just seemed more practical than having to learn someone else's code, etc.
The thing I'm most impressed with about VS is how, for example, I can create an MVC Entity Framework app, build a couple of skeleton model classes, then have VS generate a database, controllers, views, etc. for me. I tell it "Here's what I want my data to look like" and it does all of the grunt work. Then I just customize it to get it to do what I want. Right-click on pretty much anything and you'll have options for VS to spew out code of some sort or another.
It's just cool! 
On the other hand, you have different fingers. - Steven Wright
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Well, it has a very nice debugger.
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I assume we are not talking about the bug-ridden POS that is VS2017? 
VS2015 is great - why did they have to ruin it! 
- I would love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code.
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Welcome to the 1990s.
There might still be a bit of catching up to do, though.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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Same here
Someone's therapist knows all about you!
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TonyManso wrote: Visual Studio is like the greatest thing since sliced bread.
I disagree. It's not like the greatest thing since sliced bread. It is the greatest thing since sliced bread.
/ravi
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Understand completely. When I started this ride, I began teaching community college electronics courses, one of which was programming. My students hated it! We started with 8080 assembler to get something done, (and the had to rewrite each instruction definition from the Intel manual in their own words); once they understood what was happening at that level, I introduced them to Turbo Pascal. Lo and behold, what took the a week of assembly level that could do in an hour. Those that continued never forgot the lesson - to know what is going on under the covers. The covers have gotten more varied and are covered in paisley, but the lesson remains.
Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe, and not make messes in the house. - Lazarus Long
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stoneyowl2 wrote: Those that continued never forgot the lesson
And those that continue further can then become just as quick with assembly again. Once you have things like calling conventions and accessing libraries out of the way, it's not so hard. You just write the same short functions you would also have written in a higher language and you call the same library functions.
The language is JavaScript. that of Mordor, which I will not utter here
This is Javascript. If you put big wheels and a racing stripe on a golf cart, it's still a f***ing golf cart.
"I don't know, extraterrestrial?"
"You mean like from space?"
"No, from Canada."
If software development were a circus, we would all be the clowns.
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It is not just VS that allows you to glue libraries together. One of our devs recently put together a python POC, almost every operation was done by an open source library.
An enterprise level java application built on hadoop currently in development is based on a technology stack that is mind boggling I think I counted 17 different libraries/tool sets being blended together to build the application.
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity
RAH
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I'm still waiting for VS to have a Google extension that does this:
"It looks like you're writing code that has already been written by others. Here are some GitHub, Code Project, and SO links that you should look at." 
Marc
Latest Article - Merkle Trees
Learning to code with python is like learning to swim with those little arm floaties. It gives you undeserved confidence and will eventually drown you. - DangerBunny
Artificial intelligence is the only remedy for natural stupidity. - CDP1802
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Taking cutting and pasting from SO to a whole new level.
Except leaving the purpose of the code out of the search, creating a whole new type of interesting bugs. 
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TonyManso wrote: and libraries (other than stdio) were for sissies!
Why use stdio, the core functions read() and write() were easily sufficient.
stdio was just more laggy bloat
bet you were one of those softies that used strcpy() and it's friends too - more rubbish that for instance in this case could easily be achieved in a single for(); statement.
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Nice and well as long as your projects don't span 10 years or more. Mickeysoft has no interest in supporting yesterday's greatest idea. They want to sell you their next great thing. Just try to make major changes to a project that has been built with some older version of VisualStudio and you will see how you pay back the time you may have saved. With interest.
The way I see it, in the long run it's better to stay independent of Mickeysoft's ideas. If you count in the time I saved by not learning things that went exactly nowhere or that are incompatible to older versions, you might come to other conclusions.
The language is JavaScript. that of Mordor, which I will not utter here
This is Javascript. If you put big wheels and a racing stripe on a golf cart, it's still a f***ing golf cart.
"I don't know, extraterrestrial?"
"You mean like from space?"
"No, from Canada."
If software development were a circus, we would all be the clowns.
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CDP1802 wrote: as long as your projects don't span 10 years or more
My company's flagship product was released 16 years ago. I've been working on it my entire career. If I stay a few more years, I just might get the migration re-write finished! 
"Go forth into the source" - Neal Morse
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Just look at my reply to the post below. I think I had my share of scenarios where the nice new VS turns against you and then eats more time than it can ever save you. For my projects I now use SharpDevelop and miss only one really essential feature up to now: I can't debug into a webservice call up to now. With only this exception, I think less sometimes is more.
The language is JavaScript. that of Mordor, which I will not utter here
This is Javascript. If you put big wheels and a racing stripe on a golf cart, it's still a f***ing golf cart.
"I don't know, extraterrestrial?"
"You mean like from space?"
"No, from Canada."
If software development were a circus, we would all be the clowns.
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