We make our applications in visual studio, but...

[ident]

what was VS made in?

Bit like the chicken and the egg to me lol

[si_the_geek]

A large part of recent versions are generally made using the previous version (the "slow chat" forum contains comments from the VS developers saying something like that), but obviously the very first version needed a different compiler (presumably some kind of C), and a lot more effort.

There are also some parts which need to be seriously optimised, in which case they are likely to be written using a lower level option (perhaps even assembler).

[jmcilhinney]

You don't need VS to make a .NET application. All you need is the .NET SDK. That contains the compilers, etc. Much of VS would have been made that way.

[Max Peck]

You don't need VS to make a .NET application. All you need is the .NET SDK. That contains the compilers, etc. Much of VS would have been made that way.

True enough but, at this point, who would want to construct a complex Windows Forms (or ASP.Net) application "manually" like that, eh?

-Max

[jmcilhinney]

True enough but, at this point, who would want to construct a complex Windows Forms (or ASP.Net) application "manually" like that, eh?

-Max

Noone, but I'm just pointing out that VS is not the chicken or the egg. Well, maybe a really well dressed chicken.

[Shaggy Hiker]

Noone, but I'm just pointing out that VS is not the chicken or the egg. Well, maybe a really well dressed chicken.

That would be a penguin.

[ckennedy79]

what was VS made in?

Bit like the chicken and the egg to me lol

Applesoft Basic (j/k)

From everything I've seen or read, Microsoft focuses on using the previous iteration of their software to create the next. They view it as forcing the developers to "live with their own mess" so to speak, as part of a Q/A thing.

I agree though, I'm sure there has to be low level optimizing in there.

[Shaggy Hiker]

The term they use is that they "eat their own dog food."

[NickThissen]

That makes much sense to me. I once spent weeks making a script editor for some game, it had most of the features most coding IDEs have and I was very proud of it, until I tried to actually use it and found it didn't really work very well practically. Well, it worked much better than using Notepad (which was the only other option really) but it didn't work as well as I had imagined it. After that I could work on improving that and in the end I feel it turned into a pretty decent editor. I guess MS do the same with Visual Studio. By using it to create the next version they automatically get a feel for what works and what doesn't, what isn't needed and what should be added, etc.

I just wished they would release some of the controls they use in their IDE. For example, their TabControls aren't default (they support upside down as well as sideways tabs in the system visual theme which as far as I know the Framework TabControl doesn't natively support). Also their Menu/ToolStrips are much more advanced then the MenuStrip and ToolStrip we get to work with. I am talking mainly about run-time customization and such. The tool window docking and tabbed MDI support are other things I'd love to see available to us... Most of these things you can get via third party controls (usually quite expensive) but I feel that if MS is using them in the Visual Studio IDE then it should be possible to release them or add them to the framework. Unless they are somehow 'coupled' with the IDE itself deeply which I doubt...

[ckennedy79]

The term they use is that they "eat their own dog food."

LOL, not exactly the terminology I've heard it refered to as so I cleaned it up myself.

[dilettante]

Eating your own dog food was a past philosophy at Microsoft. It still holds in many places but probably not as rigorously as it did at Microsoft for a while.