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I've honestly never seen anyone do that..

In visual studio go to Help -> "Add and remove help content" and that will allow you to download entire topics like .net 4.5 docs.

You can even throw whatever you download on a network, and anyone can access it from there rather than individually needing to download it. That requires setting something in the registry though to access from the network (let me know if you want to know though).

Why? All you need to know is the grid width\height, and whether a grid coord is empty. All of which is shown in the example.

For me I like static typing because it adds a sanity check of the data getting passed around. Sure, most of the time it catches nothing, but it is nice when it does. Humans will always make mistakes, so static typing improves the amount of help\tools computers can put forth.

You only need the pro version for plugins.. Although I haven't used express so I cannot speak on if it supports plugins too..

Exactly my feelings about it. Being able to specify types, and having the compiler warn me of mistakes is a godsend when comparing it to just writing javascript.

And when valid javascript is valid typescript, it seems odd to not opt to use it when the only addition is a compile step to ensure sanity.

It feels like using the mouse is the tradeoff for using Microsoft products. I use Visual Studio and SQL Sever at work, and they are such a productivity boost, but I hate how often I have to use the mouse. The problem is many of the benefits of using their products perks would be difficult to navigate around with a keyboard.

At times it's frustrating how often you have to use the mouse, but other times it's so great compared to any alternative ways (that I know of).

Agreed. I had searched for a couple minutes to make sure I was putting the bug in the right place when I reported it. And even then there was no great way to search that it wasn't a duplicate considering how easy it is for forum posts to collide on a search.

I think it's just a matter of what's deemed important. I posted a bug on the forums, got a reply, and within the next update it was fixed.

IE10 has a smaller chrome at the top than both Chrome, and Firefox. I hear you on the plugins though.

It doesn't crash IE10 on Win7

There is a price for it right at the top. Granted, the page took ages to load (could just be the HN load though).

How come?

The way you prevent cheating in a game like this is that the game itself runs on the server. The client side is merely showing a representation of the server state. If people want to edit the scripts to show an invalid state who cares. Granted latency becomes a huge challenge, but in a perfect world (no latency) having the scripts on the clients side and having people edit them isn't a big deal

Because their business model benefits from knowing everything it can about you.

What about WebSockets, aren't they TCP?

win8 x64 didn't go down for me at that time..

Wonder what the difference is? I don't sync among devices, but for the people that it did crash for do you sync among devices? Maybe that has something to do with it?

No GP but, personally I don't feel it's as good as the VS debugger. Unless I am missing something you still have to type into the console to get the value of things you want instead of just hovering over things, or bringing up quick watch in visual studio.

Also I'd imagine (haven't used it yet!) if you change the source in visual studio while debugging it would save to a file, while I cannot do that in chrome. I think I've heard it's possible in chrome, but never really seen how.

I disagree that needing to learn something is counter productive. They are simply extra capabilities, and you don't need to use them if you don't want to. I've been using visual studio for a few years now an I still out of the blue find an extra capability that makes me have to hit less buttons, or not having to touch the mouse.

Little things like jumping to a function with pressing a button, or finding all things that are referencing a function\class\etc are extremely useful, but certainly not necessary. Then things like intellisense are a godsend.

That being said, a lot of my time is spent out of visual studio, but with Sublime Text which add's a lot of things that simply make me have to type less, and focus more on the actual task at hand.

Just because there are more verbose languages, it doesn't take away from how verbose Java is.

Thank you for the link, I know what my next read will be!

The quoted line was from going back, editing, and even screwing that up. haha

I can see what you're saying. I still feel like intuitive code == simpler, but we'll have to agree to disagree.

This has made me more interested in diving in and learning some lower level stuff since you believe it is more simple. At the very least it'd be a great learning experience.

That is in no way simpler, only faster. I have no experience with writing for C64, but to me at a quick glance it makes little sense just skimming over that.

Now take a language like RoR which I have never used. I can easily look at it and atleast kind of see what is going on.

The abstractions we have now atleast allow for code that can read like a book, and that is a lot less intimidating for someone trying to get started with programming.

What is wrong with data binding? I only know the basics of it but I find it pretty useful. Is there something I am missing?

For me the biggest reason is speed. I use visual studio at work and love it, but when I am at home writing javascript. All those extra features just make it such a slow experience.

Definitely see your point. During my time in college I only used Linux also. Now I work for a niche company where using C# allows us to get a lot done very quickly for the size of the company, and it's efficiency for getting stuff done is amazing. I love how great it is for completing stuff, but does suck not being able to use on any platform.

That being said unless it's just a quick hack for myself I tend to stray from C# due to it not being usable on all platforms.

How come?

Gotcha, my suggestion, might require too much change to be worthwhile, but won't hurt to say it. Here is the assumptions I am working off of:

- You have a background layer, lets just say it's a blue background - A middle layer, lets say clouds that move as you move to the right - And a tile layer, which draws the sprites, and the tiles of the maps

For the tile layer, we can break it down into two separate groups, animated sprites, and static sprites.

The static sprites, can be drawn to the offscreen canvas, and you get the imageData from that one time, and then push that data to the screen there after. Then the animated sprites will just be drawn to the on screen canvas every time. http://imgur.com/n6RFF The stuff that should be drawn to the offscreen canvas, then grab the image data has gray around it, and the animated sprites are in the green.

So for drawing the tiles of the map we only have to loop through the tile data, one time, and after that if the imgData remains valid (a separate flag) we can just push that imgData to the screen.

This would also allow drawing section of the screens on the offscreen canvas in chunks, and storing that draw to just be pushed to the screen at appropriate times.

I don't know if I explained it very well, I could probably through together a crappy little demo if you'd like.

Are you redrawing every time to the invisible canvas, or are you saving the data, and just pushing that to the screen? I'm not entirely sure if this is plausible for you situation, but take the event of a game like mario. The ground on the bottom can be drawn one time grabbing each tile from a tile sheet, and then you can save that bitmap data, so you cut out having to 'pick out' each tile, and just push that data to the screen. Any chance you have an example of what you're doing for your sprite\tile layer? I believe it can be a bit fast this way, but we may just not be on the same page.

Are you currently prerendering to a separate canvas? Drawing it to a different (hidden) canvas, grabbing the image data, and just pushing that to the actual canvas might be a bit performance boost.