I spent a good part of the day today moving a number of my Win32 C++ projects to Orcas from projects that ran under VS 2003. Most of these projects are system level DLL projects (a couple ISAPI DLLs, a couple of support DLLs for Visual FoxPro and a few system interfaces that simply easier to do with C than writing interop code). There are about 10 projects total and to date they have all been maintained in Visual Studio 2003.

I attempted moving those projects some time back to VS 2005 (which I bitched about here), but I was really turned off by the fact that the compiled binary size doubled in a few cases and bulged significantly with others - since these were small add-in components I decided that wasn't worth the hassle so I left 'em in VS 2003. Which as it turns out has been a pain in the ass. Three Windows installations later and having to install VS 2003 just for these seldom used projects and patching VS 2003 through to Vista.

So I was figuring Orcas would be more of the same, but gave it a shot anyway. I'm not looking forward to maintaining VS 2003, VS 2005 and VS Orcas all on one machine <s>. So I moved the Win32 projects over. It wasn't a super smooth process - lots of new compiler warnings/errors that actually required me to fix a number of casts that worked fine previously - but overall relatively painless. These library style projects are all statically linked so they have no additional dependencies and size will depend on what the linker brings in and how big the link libraries are. The resulting binaries are not quite as compact as VS 2003, but it's a reasonable size increase (around 10-15% for all projects). I can live with that. Score!

The C++ editor has also come a long way from VS 2003 - it's much more responsive and Intellisense support is much improved which - for my on again off again C coding - is a big help even with simple things. When you look at C/C++ code once or twice a year (especially when working with C# most of the rest of the time)  I take any help I can get. More importantly though is the fact that VS 2003 is having some serious issues under Vista with C++ - certain files and not even the bigger ones cause the editor to crawl beyond usability and causing VS 2003 to crash frequently.Apparently it's in some way related to Intellisense 'getting stuck' while typing <shrug>.

In VS.NET 2008 Microsoft has really kicked up warnings in relation to security and I was able to lock down a host of problems with CRT function usage in a short order. There were uhm a few questionable operations in my code that the compiler deftly flagged.

I'm glad to see that I can finally put VS 2003 to rest, and glad that VS NET Orcas is going to make it much easier for me to possibly just run a single copy of Visual Studio on my machine.

That I can really dig!