So, I got myself a copy of Visual Studio 2012 Pro.  It’s pretty nice, except for the shitty all-caps menus (which you can turn off with the registry hack located here).  I really didn’t have any plans on moving Gorgon v2.x to .NET 4.5/VS2012 until I saw this:

No more PIX! I can barely contain myself.

This is a big deal to me. I can’t begin to tell you how much I hated PIX (the graphics debugger from the Direct X SDK). When I could get it working, it was painful because I had to run it outside of Visual Studio and even then a lot of stuff failed in PIX and/or crashed PIX.  And don’t even bother trying to do graphics debugging with a 64 bit application in PIX…  Anyway, being able to debug my shaders and stuff in Visual Studio makes me a happy boy.

One other really neat thing I noticed (and it’s about time) is that I could open up the Visual Studio 2010 solution/project files and it didn’t try to convert them, meaning that I could make changes to the 2010 files in VS2012, and still open them in VS2010.   This means I only need to keep -1- copy of Visual Studio and it’ll work when updating the 1.x and 2.x versions and won’t screw up the files.   I am pleased.

So, yeah, I’m moving version 2.x to Visual Studio 2012/.NET 4.5.  Hopefully this won’t be a painful thing for people, and it shouldn’t be:  By the time Gorgon 2.x is released, we’ll probably be on to Visual Studio 2112/.NET Temple of Syrinx Edition (a little Rush joke) and it’ll be moot.  So, to reiterate: going forward you’ll require Visual Studio 2012 to compile/use Gorgon 2.x.

I know people might hem and haw over this… “But Tape, I can’t afford to remove my other kidney and sell it on the black market so I can afford the newest Visual Studio!  I already sold my first one because I needed to get Visual Studio 2008 (or 2010)”   And to you I say, fret not.  As with previous versions of Gorgon, this version works just fine with the Express edition of Visual Studio 2012 (I tested tonight), which is free… well, free as in you’ll have to give Microsoft your precious personal information to register it, which is a joke really… anyway, it won’t cost you money.  Just your soul.

And now, this part, because I can only assume someone’s going to ask about it:  Gorgon 1.x (i.e. the one that actually works and is available for you to use) will remain as a Visual Studio 2010 project  and I have no plans to migrate that version.  So, if you’re that hell bent on staying with Visual Studio 2010, then that’s the version of Gorgon you want.   Plus, it’s the only version that’s available right now… so… yeah, you don’t have much choice in the matter.

That is all.