Please tell me, VC6 or not ?

[Will Rothwell]

Hi all,

My company is going to upgrade to VC 6.0. I have read so much horror stories here in codeguru that a perfectly OK app. compiled and worked under VC 5.0 suddenly dies in VC 6.

Could anyone who have been there, done it and returned alive please tell me is it worth the effort to upgrade VC 5.0 to VC 6.0. My intelligence tell me don't get yourself into trouble for no reason. So please also tell me the good things about VC 6 in the real world, and not those in advertisement review ?

Before it is so late, I still have an option to keep my VC 5.0. Thanks.

Will

[Roland Seibert]

I have updated to VC6 and i have no problems. The main reason was, that in VC6 the debugger can display MMX code correctly (in VC5 you can use MMX but the debugger can't display the MMX registers, in VC4 you can't use MMX). I like very much the new editor features in VC6

[Chad Loder]

The annoying thing about VC6, for me anyways, is that VJ++ is no longer part of the same IDE -- it is a separate product. You can no longer share your DevStudio macros between VJ and VC.

[mfmaddox]

God, yes...the new editor features were more than enough reason for me to upgrade, and I have been running VC++ 6 since its release. Some of you may disagree, but the Intellitype feature really helps me keep all those function parameters correct....and it beats hell out of switching back and forth between the workspace and MSDN.

Michael F. Maddox
Senior Software Engineer
Hayes Computer Systems, a division of ProxyMed, Inc.
Tallahassee, Florida

[Daniel Plimak]

If the only reason you get VC6 is for the new class/list member listing features in the editor (in Microsoftspeak, Intellisense), that's reason enough.

Once you get over its quirks (it's really a 1.0-level release -- and we all know that MS never gets things right on the 1st try), Intellisense really makes things easier.

Cheerio,
Dan

[Derek Viljoen]

I was part of the VC6 beta program, and used it briefly during my last job. (I'm a consultant, so I move around a lot) The beta was horrible.

The release was very good, in my experience. To be fair, though, I wasn't using it for GUI stuff. We were doing a middleware CORBA project for multiple platforms, so it was just a C++ compiler to us.

BTW - we NEEDED v6 because for this project we required certain features of C++ that were not implemented in VC5. That's why we got into the beta program in the first place. So we could get the development going on the WIN32 platform. (Our Unix versions were all but done!) ... and I agree that the code-completion help is a nice touch!

[gopd]

No matter how the IDE looks or function, nothing compare to a STABLE, RELIABLE programming language. I have been using Microsoft C/C++ start from DOS version, and I can say VC6 is the most unstable and most unreliable version.

If you don't believe me, checkout those already publish VC bug lists at Microsoft VC web site. These bugs are very unforgiven and very difficult to trace. Anyway, I haven't mention those which have not been review.

Don't think that service pack will serve you well, just only months of release and Microsoft is posting a 100mb++ patches!? Best of all, these service pack is NOT WORKING PROPERLY AT ALL!!!

My company has just switch back to VC5, it is a waste spending thousands for such suck product. So, do think carefully before you upgrade to VC6.

[Kaan]

I moved from Watcom 11.0 to VC6,and I am pleased with the ease of use.The Intellisense,autocomplete,and all other stuff are good.The bad thing is the code it generates.It is not reliable as Watcom(Especially when speed optimizations are on.)So I'm using Intel compiler for release compiles.