Shulou(Shulou.com)06/01 Report--

Preface

There is no shortage of change in the world, from the industrial revolution to transistors and integrated circuits, from appliances to the Internet of things, from humble man-machine to sophisticated experience, while we enjoy the convenience of technology, we are also suffering from the challenges and declining productivity brought about by complex design. And what we are eagerly looking forward to is the tool at hand. Once upon a time, Visual Studio has always been an efficient benchmark for software development. Starting from the concise syntax and simple drag-and-drop of VB, Visual Studio continues to improve and adapt to rapid changes, coupled with mature ecology, so that the various partners in the Microsoft world live with interest.

In recent years, Microsoft has begun to embrace open source, invest in cloud technology, and has significantly reduced its holdings in the field of development tools, which has also made many followers feel uneasy. Today, the release of Visual Studio 2017 gives developers a few clear signals:

The prospect of mobile development is unlimited, and the solutions are diversified.

Cross-platform server support and server lightweight

Standardization of development process and continuous improvement of development efficiency

Service is superior to product

As the beneficiary of Microsoft tools, we believe that this is a good change. Only with the change can we improve and provide better service.

Review

So, in the 20 years of development of Visual Studio, what processes and technological changes have been experienced?

According to Microsoft, the first person to use the Visual Studio brand to sell is Visual Studio 97, and the subsequent version (VS6) has become a classic, even though enterprises and companies are still using it today; then Visual Studio came with .NET, ushering in the C # era, WinForm replaced VB, and controls replaced OCX,ASP.NET WebForm. With the dismal development of Windows Vista and the slow development of a new generation of graphical interface technology WPF, Microsoft used WPF to rewrite the interface and released Visual Studio 2010. Due to low performance and serious resource consumption, this version spread generally, and then Microsoft quickly reconstructed and released the high-performance Visual Studio 2012. Subsequently, software developers began to emphasize team integration, strengthening TFS's voice in Visual Studio, and each release was accompanied by the release of a new version of TFS. So I divide it into five or six technical periods to explain in detail.

199x-2003 COM/ActiveX period

Microsoft exposed a set of architecture when developing the Win3.x series, which aims to dynamically load the implementation according to the interface runtime, so as to reduce the development coupling. During this period, the main development language was Cellular languages, but the development efficiency was relatively low. At that time, the technical frontiers were RAD,VB (language) and ActiveX (technology). At the same time, the control market segment began to come to the fore. With the rise of Java and Web in the late 1990s, COM/ActiveX has suffered a great impact, especially web programming, ASP is too simple, the execution engine VBScript can not introduce the concept of RAD in VB, and the native VBScript language itself is immature and more restrictive, the solution is to call COM/ActiveX in ASP, so the whole development becomes very complex and gradually disappears in history.

WinForm/WebForm period from 2002 to 2010

In fact, Microsoft's development of .NET is not very smooth. At the beginning, it draws lessons from a lot of COM design ideas, but a lot of infrastructure is not implemented, resulting in the early ASP.NET is not very stable, and many developers even continue the architecture of the previous generation of products in order to consider compatibility, by importing COM components to achieve the bottom layer, while ASP.NET is only a layer of performance. On the other hand, due to the rapid development of the C # language, Designer (designer) developed with the concept of RAD quickly makes WinForm/WebForm a sharp tool for development, which is recognized by users both in efficiency and in finished products.

WPF period 2007-2013

With the development and maturity of the .NET platform, WinForm user developers complain about the refinement of the interface and resource utilization, but these are due to the fact that the underlying implementation of WinForm is only encapsulated by a layer of Win32 API, so it is difficult to enhance the user experience through enhancement and patching. Just as Microsoft launched its new generation of operating system, the main function is user experience. For this reason, the WPF technology project was launched around 2005, and officially began to be promoted in VS2008. However, due to the performance and complex implementation, the recognition of WPF is not high, and the Silverlight launched at the same time did not persist for a few years and was submerged in the dust of history.

2009-2016 ASP.NET MVC period

Although WebForm technology is very popular because of RAD, its ViewStates technology makes large-scale projects and Internet projects suffer a lot. For example, some people begin to restructure the existing ASP.NET technology, separate business from presentation, and gradually form the early concept of ASP.NET MVC. Then Microsoft quickly caught up and introduced Razor technology, completely rewrote the bottom layer of HTTP, and completely removed ViewStates. From then on, web development is not only efficient. At the same time, it can also meet the latest HTML standards. In 2012, the concept of SPA became popular, and more and more companies began to try to separate the front and back ends, which made ASP.NET a little bit of a crisis. as a result, the ASP.NET MVC WEB API project was started, once again simplified on the basis of the lightweight MVC architecture, so that RESTful API-based applications can be adopted in the .NET community.

2014-present UWP (Universal Windows Platform) period

To tell you the truth, I don't really want to list this as an independent technology circle. In fact, this UWP is not much new, but more of a concept. Its presentation layer is WPF's Xaml, and the bottom layer is a general platform concept based on projection (such as PCL and WinRT). The only thing that can be praised is the later addition of Xamarin, which brings C# to the field of full-platform mobile development. However, it is still a minority. We have to keep trying.

2016-present. Net Core period

Since its official release in 2016, the performance of .NET Core has been getting better and better. With the enhanced OWIN interface, web development has been well decoupled, giving third-party middleware more performance opportunities, but it is still young and it will take time to adopt it on a large scale.

Summary

As time flies, the Visual Studio brand has entered its 20th anniversary. It has experienced and witnessed its ups and downs since it began to do .NET control development more than a decade ago to deal with Visual Studio every day. Now, VS2017 has officially announced its release, and has prepared a grand celebration for its 20th anniversary. I also take this opportunity to wish Visual Studio and Microsoft technology better and better.

Welcome to subscribe "Shulou Technology Information " to get latest news, interesting things and hot topics in the IT industry, and controls the hottest and latest Internet news, technology news and IT industry trends.