Visual Studio 2013 and the arrogance of Microsoft

I have just installed the recently released Microsoft Visual Studio 2013 and the most striking thing about it seems to be the sheer arrogance of Microsoft and contempt for its customers.

It needs Windows 7 or greater to install which is fair enough - even  though my corporate desktop is still Windows XP (not for long as it goes out of support in April 2014).

No, the ridiculous thing is that VS 2013 requires you to install IE 10 before it can be installed. That's right - you have to upgrade your browser to IE10 before you can install the IDE!

This is a complete dealbreaker for many corporate environments.

Fortunately here's a workaround windows command script. VS2013 seems to work just fine with ie8 so it seems to be a marketing driven decision only.

@ECHO OFF

:IE10HACK 
REG ADD "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Internet Explorer" /v Version /t REG_SZ /d "9.10.9200.16384" /f 
REG ADD "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Internet Explorer" /v svcVersion /t REG_SZ /d "10.0.9200.16384" /f 
REG ADD "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer" /v Version /t REG_SZ /d "9.10.9200.16384" /f 
REG ADD "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer" /v svcVersion /t REG_SZ /d "10.0.9200.16384" /f 
GOTO EXIT

:REVERTIE 
REG DELETE "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Internet Explorer" /v svcVersion 
REG DELETE "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer" /v svcVersion 
REG ADD "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Internet Explorer" /v Version /t REG_SZ /d "8.0.7601.17514" /f 
REG ADD "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer" /v Version /t REG_SZ /d "8.0.7601.17514" /f 
GOTO EXIT

:EXIT

 The other act of corporate arrogance is that they have deprecated non-unicode MFC applications, with the lame excuse that the 64 Mb MFC MBCS libraries would bloat their 5.7 Gb distribution of VS2013. You can still build MBCS applications but the libraries need to be downloaded separately from here.

Porting a legacy app from mbcs to Unicode is a non-trivial task... especially if there is direct pointer manipulation that assumes 8 bit chars sprinkled through the code base. This would be a whole lot of pain for zero gain.