A visual history of Visual C++ (2017)
17 comments
·August 23, 2025keithnz
philiplu
I worked on that! I was a dev on the team that built the first IntelliSense engine for C++. It’s a miracle it worked at all. It was based on a hacked-up version of the C++ front-end, but when it inevitably hit errors attempting a single-pass parse of the current source, it would silently bull its way through and try not to get too screwed up. Doing that in the presence of templates was not a good time. But with the RAM and processing speeds available then, I’m still kind of shocked it worked at all, 28 years ago.
AdieuToLogic
You know what this doesn't show?
Visual C++ v4.2b generating an assignment operator which invoked the destructor of a returned object before assigning it to the lval.
That was fun to figure out. :-/
Disposal8433
I remember a bug in an old Visual C++ that would fill your RAM and swap (therefore hard drive) if you forgot a semicolon at the end of a class, like:
class A { int a }
int main(...)
userbinator
Interesting to see the UI change (degradation) over time. The first version makes it very clear what's a button and clickable at first glance, while the latest version looks like a sea of whitespace and makes that far more difficult.
copper_think
One thing not mentioned is that Visual C++ and Visual Basic historically were separate IDEs with separate codebases. When the time came to unify them, only one of them could continue on. My understanding is that Visual Basic won, and that today's Visual Studio IDE (devenv.exe, msenv.dll, etc.) is the continuation of that VB codebase.
I don't actually know in which release that transition happened. But since there's a screenshot of each version in the article, presumably that transition is visually documented...
aaronbrethorst
If memory serves, it was Visual InterDev that won, actually. The VID IDE was the forerunner to Visual Studio.NET 2002, which was the first unified Visual Studio IDE.
n.b. I worked on the Visual Studio Core team, which maintained devenv.exe, among other things, from 2003-2007'ish.
ack_complete
That might have been the transition from Visual C++/Basic 4 to 6 (I skipped 5), but the cataclysmic one was the switch from Visual Studio 6 to Visual Studio .NET, when large portions of the IDE and build system were rewritten in .NET. Visual Studio .NET (2002) was much slower and much buggier than VS6. The native debugger was glacial at conditional breakpoints and debug output, the build system took an eternity to do a dependency check, its UI visibly redrew more slowly, etc. It was so bad that Microsoft had to create a special offer for the Visual Studio .NET (2003) upgrade for only ~$30.
This transition was not great for Visual Basic developers either since their language was transitioned from generating native code (VB6) to becoming dependent upon the .NET Framework (VB.NET), supported secondarily to C#.
becurious
After Visual C++ 6. They broke a lot of the C++ IDE features and they weren’t as good as the prior versions (dialog editor etc) so for a long time we preferred staying on 6. I think if we could have the newer compilers but the snappiness of that UI many developers would be happy.
It’s also a product of the segmentation of the developer tools in Microsoft. The Windows team was responsible for the compiler rather than the Developer Tools team.
philiplu
No, that's not really true. I was on the C++ compiler team from 1991 to 2006. When I first started, the DevTools team reported up through the Windows team, but never really felt a well-integrated part. We were never in the same building as the Windows team, for instance. I remember, probably 1992 or 1993, driving from building 4 where the compiler team lived to the Windows building (forget which one that was, maybe in the 12 to 15 block back then?) to get a copy of the Windows NT source on a hard drive. That's because I was a dev on the C++ compiler back-end team then (moved to the front-end in '95, IIRC), and compiling that source was a major test of the 32-bit compiler I was working on.
Don't remember when DevTools was re-orged out from under Windows, but I'm pretty sure it was by '95, and well before VC++ 6.
becurious
Did you ever work on the cross edition that would compile Windows apps for the Mac? I think that was a version 4 fork that never got another version.
ack_complete
The dialog editor is a good example of the damage that was done with the VS.NET transition. When they rewrote it to use the WinForms-based UI, they introduced a fundamental bug: the Z-order for picking was reversed so that clicking on a stack of controls selected the one on the bottom. Very annoying for controls like group controls intended to be stacked below other controls. Bug filed, WONTFIX'd, and it's still broken to this day.
keithnz
the big thing I missed was their macro editor, it was really good for automating things.
georgeecollins
I think that is right and perhaps that is why, as I recall, Visual C went from almost unusable to a pretty good development environment between version 2 and 4. This is all (old) memory and anecdote.
TrueTom
The Windows 2000 era was really peak computing.
dnamlin
Binders full of MSDN CD-ROMs...IYKYK
It doesn't point out the massive productivity boost of Visual C++ 6, IntelliSense (ie, autocomplete). This saved so much time from having to look up documentation.