Cromulent

I'm seriously considering buying Visual Studio 2012 Professional but I'm trying to decide whether to get it with an MSDN subscription or not. If I get it with a subscription it adds nearly £500 on to the total cost which is a lot of money. Since I mainly do development work on one machine and don't really need to do much testing on older versions of Windows I don't think I'd get much benefit from that side of things. I'm primarily thinking of getting it because I want to transition some of my Microsoft Office VBA projects to using the Office development tools in Visual Studio so that I can finally ditch VBA in favour of C#. I guess I'd also benefit from the Windows Azure included services as well but other than that I'm not so sure.

 

Is there anything that I am missing here or should I just ignore the MSDN subscription and save myself £500?

I thought that people here might be interested but the newest release of the AMD catalyst drivers (13.4) adds support for some OpenGL 4.3 features. Namely these:

 

• GL_ARB_compute_shader
• GL_ARB_multi_draw_indirect
• GL_ARB_shader_storage_buffer_object
• GL_ARB_arrays_of_arrays
• GL_ARB_clear_buffer_object
• GL_ARB_ES3_compatibility
• GL_ARB_explicit_uniform_location
• GL_ARB_fragment_layer_viewport
• GL_ARB_invalidate_subdata
• GL_ARB_program_interface_query
• GL_ARB_shader_image_size
• GL_ARB_stencil_texturing
• GL_ARB_texture_buffer_range
• GL_ARB_texture_query_levels
• GL_ARB_texture_storage_multisample

See the release notes for details:

 

http://support.amd.com/us/kbarticles/Pages/AMDCatalyst13-4WINReleaseNotes.aspx

 

Personally I'm pretty happy that AMD are still expanding support for OpenGL.

Are you planning on making any metro style apps (of any kind not just games)?

I'm just wondering what people are thinking about the new version of Windows and whether they think it is worth spending the time developing for the Windows app store.

Interested to hear your responses .

I can browse the MSDN forums just fine when not logged into my Windows Live account but as soon as I try and login I get a redirect loop error message (at least in Chrome, the other browsers display a different error message).

I've tried it with the following browsers:

IE 9
Chrome 21
Opera 12.02
Firefox 15

and they all cause problems. Is anyone else seeing issues like this? It is highly annoying as I have a question I'd like to ask that I think would be best answered there.

Currently I have an AMD Radeon HD 7950 3GB card which supports OpenGL 4.2 but I was wondering if anyone had any idea if AMD will update the drivers for the card to support OpenGL 4.3 or will I need to wait for the next set of hardware to be released?