Help on choosing the right product

Help on choosing the right product

• tkmiller

  Hi Boris,
  
  I've already downloaded and installed the Express Edition (Beta 1 & Beta 2), but it lacks support for Extensibility, which it turned out to be of substantial importance to us. So I tried the Visual Studio Beta 2, but then I decided to go for a stable product and not a beta one; speaking frankly I have found no really serious bugs in this Beta version, but too many little things give me the impression of a product where there's still work to be done in refinements, not in primary areas.
  
  Sometimes it hangs, sometimes it crashes, Intellisense comes and goes, the help works 50% of the time and has a lot of broken links. I'd like however to point out that our situation is maybe not the most common one.
  
  All of our project is in standard C, and there is no reference to third part library, (MFC, ATL, .NET), nor Microsoft specific extensions, in fact at the moment it compiles with another compiler. We are searching primarily an editor and an IDE to arrange nearly a thousand files in their respective two hundreds modules, and maybe a compiler to switch to.
  
  I understand that there are a lot of capabilities and potentialities in Visual Studio which are working well in this Beta version, but they are of no importance for us in this moment, so we concentrated our testing in few sectors of interest, finding out, very sinthetically, that 2003 edition works better than this 2005 Beta 2.
  
  For our needings it is however too expensive. So I was trying to understand if Visual C++ could work the same way at a reduced cost. My only doubt is the optimizing compiler; which kind of optimization it lacks  Maybe the Profiling tool
  
  Thanks,
  Piero.
  
  

• tjanuario

  Hi,
  I am now using Visual Studio 2003 Professional.
  Could anyone please clarify if the optimizing compiler of VC++ 2005 Express Edition supercedes the optimizing compiler in VC++ 2003 Prof. in terms of performance
  
  I am doing mainly high-performance calculations on large amounts of numeric data (taking hours to days). However, sometimes I need to make a simple UI, which should be much easier in 2005 Express, because I can access .Net easily.
  
  If the performance hit in VC++ 2005 Express compared to 2003 Prof. is moderate, I would switch completely (until I can get VC++ 2005 Prof.). I will appreciate any info on that.
  
  Thanks,
  
  Maciej.
  
  
  

• chenthorn

  Hi Piero,
  
  First of all, feel free to email me some of your complaints regarding Visual C++ 2005 Beta 2 (you can download the Express edition for free on the web too) and I will see whether they have been resolved or if not, there is still time to fix some serious customer bugs.
  
  When it comes to version 2003, let us be clear, even though the naming may not be intuitive, Visual Studio and Visual C++ are the same thing. The differences lies in the fact that Visual Studio ships with all the languages and has additional features (such as the remote debugger you pointed out). If all of your development is in C then Visual C++ alone will be sufficient if you do not want the extra tools.
  
  Thanks,
  
  
  

• Dmitry Polyakovsky

  Piero Silvestri wrote:

  Hello, another question arise: what does it mean "Build and deploy professional-grade applications by using a powerful optimizing compiler." Maybe that Visual C++ does not have an optimizing compiler Or that it's not intended to be a 'Professional' product Thanks in advance, Piero Silvestri.

  
  Hey!
  Visual C++ Standard 2003 is my product of choice(for C and C++). However you DO NOT have optimiziong compiler in it :( So, if you are developing DirectX/OpenGL or any application with some performance issues I do not recommend Standard version. For the rest I found it really good(I do not code DirectX :P)
  
  
  
  

• talitore

  Jonathan, thanks for the clarification.
  

• Berggreen

  I know this thread is old but I think Ronald's response is not exactly the answer to the question and I am a little disappointed in the amount of searching that I had to do to get all of the pieces to this answer.  The fact is the Express and Standard editions do not include Profile Guided Optimizations.  So theses two editions do not perform Inlining, Virtual Call Speculation, Register Allocation, Basic Block Optimization, Size/Speed Optimization, Function Layout, Conditional Branch Optimization, Dead Code Separation, EH Code Separation and Memory Intrinsics.  Basically almost all of the useful performance optimizations.
  
  So my question is, what optimizations does the express and standard version perform   At least to me, without these there isn't anything useful being performed.
  
  Please feel free to correct me, I'm hoping that I am wrong.
  
  
  
  For a description of Profile-Guided Optimization see:
  http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp url=/library/en-us/dv_vstechart/html/profileguidedoptimization.asp 
  Article title: Profile-Guided Optimization with Microsoft Visual C++ 2005
  
  For a description of each optimization see:
  http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/e7k32f4k
  Article title: Profile-Guided Optimizations
  
  

• Thomas Koch

  This is not correct: the optimizer that ships with the Standard and Professional Editions of Visual C++ 2005 also performs these optimizations.
  
  What PGO adds on top of these optimizations is that it uses data from running user scenarios to "guide" this optimizations.
  
  

• Bojan Macele

  Hello Maciej,
  I'm also working with high-performance calculations(magnetism modeling) and in my investigations I have found that my project runs better with VC++ 2005 Express than with VC 2003 Prof toolkit. So I recommed you to try it. There is also 1 more new thing that Express edition is missing(it was not present in 2003 at all) -> profile guided optiomalizations which could speed up this kind of projects by few %(it's a lot for me). They are present in VS 2005 Prof. I'm waiting for trial version to test it.
  
  Regards,
  Przemek Owczarek
  
  
  

• LordDark

  Hi Piero,
  
  Specfically to your question: the compiler in the Standard Edition of Visual C++ .NET 2003 basically has no optimizations at all.
  
  Visual C++ 2005 Express and all Editions of Visual Studio 2005 (including Standard) do have the optimizing compiler. Only Professional and up versions have support for Profile Guided Optimizations and for OpenMP.
  
  Actually none of the 2003 editions ship with a profiler from Microsft. The Team Developer, Tester and Team Suite editions of 2005 do.
  
  Ronald Laeremans
  Visual C++ team
  
• Help on choosing the right product