Recap: Back in June, Microsoft:
- announced that were were moving to a faster cadence and shipped VS 2013 one year after VS 2012;
- announced that new ISO C++ conformance features from the November 2012 CTP (and more) would be available in VS 2013, but not in VS 2012 Updates; and
- didn’t announce pricing for VS 2013, so people who had just paid for VS 2012 Professional (only that specific SKU) were concerned that they might be charged full price again for VS 2013 Professional. (This applies to Professional only, because all other SKUs get free upgrades anyway — Express is always free, and Premium and Ultimate are subscription-based with free upgrades included in the subscription.)
I just want to remind anyone who bought VS 2012 Professional that when the actual pricing was announced last month, it was announced that to ease the transition there would be a limited time promotional upgrade from VS 2012 Professional to VS 2013 Professional for $99, available from early November (now) until the end of January. You can wait until after the holidays to decide whether you want it, but I thought I’d just give another heads-up about the time limit if this upgrade matters to you.
I hope this is a good value, as VS 2013 has lots of new features for C++ users beyond just the additional ISO C++ conformance: lots of editor improvements from simple things like brace completion and parameter-sensitive Intellisense to the (IMO cool) enhanced scrollbar and peek definition; C++ AMP improvements; optimization improvements including a smarter auto-vectorizer; and much more. See this blog post for an overview of what’s new in VC++ 2013 — the team did a lot in just one year, and thank you again to everyone who helped to make this happen!
What’s next for Visual C++:
- At Build and GoingNative, we announced that a preview CTP of the next batch of C++11/14 language features will be available this quarter. We’re still on track for that. Watch vcblog and this space for the announcement.
- Tomorrow is the VS 2013 virtual launch. Given that we already shipped the product itself a month ago so that you already have it in your hands, is there any reason to watch the launch? Short answer: Yes, I think you’ll find it interesting and worth your while.
Sutter’s Mill 
How many paid upgrades are we expected to buy until we get full C++11 (or is it C++14) conformance?
Herb,
I am trying to figure out the release plans for Visual Studio for my company, and am reduced to reading various blog posts by you and various bloggers at Microsoft, watching videos, and so on. It is quite frustrating. I am happy that Microsoft is reaching out to communicate, but it is very piecemeal, and hard to stitch together what the story is.
Here’s my question. There has been talk about bug support in VS 2012 once 2013 rolled out. Best I can figure it, updates past update 4 will end for VS 2012, and most bug fixes will only be made to VS2013. If I recall, you made a comment *somewhere* (I can’t find it to even confirm if it was you or not), that perhaps 3 line fixes could be rolled back into 2012. But then if I search around on the Microsoft website they claim support for many years to come; does support include bug fixes?
This is extremely important to us because we work in an industry with extremely short turn around times (production TV). A stable compiler environment is worth a lot more than the latest C+11 feature for many of our projects (there are projects where the opposite is true). Keeping up to date with Visual Studio has a lot of implied costs for us. On the other hand, if we are going to be stuck with a buggy 2012 compiler, well, we will need to keep up with the latest release. To make this very clear, it has been declared that we will stay with 2012 for at least 2 years, and I need to know if this is a safe decision or risky one.
Can you offer some insight into the bug/support issue with Visual Studio now that you are in this more rapid release cycle?
@TheMatto: I don’t know anything about that, sorry. I do know the Pro 2012->2013 upgrade is $99, at least here.
@Alan: I understand that the IDE teams did a lot of work on performance, and in particular when opening lots of tabs/files. You could try out the free VC++ Express to kick the tires and see if the IDE performance is where you want it.
How is the IDE performance? My #1 biggest problem with VS2012 is the frequent 1-5sec stalls on basic operations like switching file tabs or bringing up a right-click menu.
The pricing is predatory for non-US residents. For example for VS2013 Professional in Australia, US$499 becomes US$740 in Australia from the same servers and no sales tax. All Microsoft products are priced in this way.
To make it seem really dishonest the microsoft store is also geoblocked.
@Concerned: I wouldn’t call VC++ 2013 extremely buggy, YMMV — I know of two slightly embarrassing bugs (each with dozens of duplicate reports covering overlapping cases but for the same underlying bug) but IME it’s more solid overall than VC++ 2012. Yes, there will definitely be bug fixes in Updates and possibly other ways. No specific dates have been announced for those, but last cycle saw regular Updates and you should expect the same to be true this time.
@Herb: That sounds like a great offer and I’m sure many people would be thankful to MS for providing it.
That said, given the extreme buggy nature of the VS2013 C++ compiler and library – taking into account new features and the like, is there any official word from MS as to when we can expect the urgently awaited 2013 service pack or at least out of band update?
Or will we have to wait for a VS2014/VS2015 release for those issues to be resolved.