I find it hard to judge the stability of VS2005, since
Ive been mostly working with WinFX and have Resharper
2.0 EAP installed. The verdict: it's pretty unstable,
unsurprisingly :-)
Ah well, I love VS 2005, I use it everyday, and find it
very stable - there are some things it won't do, and
sure there are things crashing it, and it can be better.
But still, it is the best IDE I ever used, and I don't
wanna switch back, or have waited longer - it's far more
than good enough for me.
And honestly, some of the 'bug'-complaints are plain
stupid "if I do this and that the IDE
crashes" - so don't do it, or can't you learn?
Or people complaining the scrollbars in the IDE don't
use the windows theme - I'd strip these folks of the
title 'developer' and name them 'user' then.
As Douglas Adams wrote: nothing spreads as fast as bad
news, and blogs make this even faster.
Roy all developers using already VS 2003 expect the
quality from VS 2005 because they know what they have
already. Nothing like 2002 where everything .Net was
new. It's a great version but its somehow frustrating
that in name of progress some rules of compatibility
were broken.
And regarding the Product Feedback Center, yes it's a
great idea, but Microsoft is the one who decide what to
consider a bug, which is a bit sad attitude.
I personally don't care about the bugs. What irks me is
that it's going to take 2 to 3 years before the next
release and/or a service pack where Microsoft fixes
them. Unfortunately, the new release will introduce new
bugs and the cycle will repeat.
I don't expect perfect software, but I do expect quality
software. Microsoft just can't seem to break the cycle
of releasing crap. Until I see regular and routine bug
fixes for their development products, they are not
moving in the right direction.
Bryan
I'm using Resharper AEP too, so I try not to be too
quick to judge it, but it is a serious pain.
I spent 10 minutes trying to figure out why VS.Net was
reporting invalid errors, only to rebuild and get a
compile-time error of:
"The application domain in which the thread was
running has been unloaded"
finally, it built ok after this. Maybe it's resharper...
I have used vs2005 since beta1 almost every day for a
medium sized winforms solution (about 15 projects). The
overall quality is acceptable, but the design time of
the winforms is much too sensitive to user coding
mistakes.
For example, if i misbehave in a default constructor of
a Form, vs.net shows an quite cryptic error that it
cannot render the form in design time (good) but than
completly crashes. Also using inherited forms is a very
sad experience.
And in the process of failing, some old temp assemblies
are left behind that you need to manually clean up
otherwise changes to your form code are never picked up
(basic clean solution doesn't help).
The funny thing is, in the last ctp/rc seemed actually
more stable to me than the RTM.
A last note about Resharper 2.0 EAP: it's nice for small
solutions, but for large solutions the startup parsing
it's just too slow when you have multiple vs.net 2005
crashes a day. And stability is not the strongest point
of the current build (210)
My 2 cents
"And honestly, some of the 'bug'-complaints are
plain stupid "if I do this and that the IDE
crashes" - so don't do it, or can't you learn?
"
You're the one who's producing stupid complaints. If I
type in code into an editor I don't want it to crash.
It's just plain text. So you're saying now that I
shouldn't type in code into an editor because it might
be crashing the IDE? What are you, a manager?
Oh, and if you're in a large project and refactoring it
from pure .NET 1.x code to .NET 2.0 code, and you have a
lot of errors (because not everything is refactored
yet), say over a 100, it takes a long delay before it
actually shows up the errors after the compile is long
done, long delay as in: 5-15 seconds minimum. On 2003
this wasn't the case. I'm not sure what it's doing, but
it's weird.
Just so you're clear in case you though that was me
Frans, that was a different Sam (from Germany). I have
no opinion on this matter without further research.
"You're the one who's producing stupid
complaints. If I type in code into an editor I don't
want it to crash. It's just plain text. So you're saying
now that I shouldn't type in code into an editor because
it might be crashing the IDE? What are you, a
manager?"
There are only a very few very special cases of source
entered that can crash the IDE. So learn them, and don't
type them. Programming in VS 2005 with source
highlighting and intellisense is very obviously not
'only entering text'. If you really only want to enter
text, use notepad.
VS 2005 is a tool, and a tool for a professional who
should be knowing what he is doing, who should be able
to learn what this tool is good for, and what not to do
with it, and act accordingly.
In the final release of Visual Studio, the MonthCalendar
Windows control has a terrible visible flaw and I wonder
how that control made it passed testing.
To see the flaw:
Drop the control on a form and run.
Select a range of dates within a month.
The display within the control is messed up.
Change the month.
The display continues to be messed up.
Also, I'm disappointed that snaplines and grid don't
work together. They must be used independently.
I do like VS.NET as a tool.
Yes Microsoft has screwed up and has been screwing up
Visual Studio since VS6
The reason is simple, there has not been a patches or
bug fixes for a compiler since VS6 SP6!
Yes if you compare the release of VS6 to VS2002-2003 or
2005 you can say they had similar issues. However the
thing that irritates us all is that you don't make that
comparison.
You compare VS200X to the VS6 SP6 release which had been
cleaned up. For some reason supporting the development
community in this way doesn't seem important to
Microsoft. I realize that there have been many new
features; they have all come at the expense of stability
and predictability.
VS200x releases have had the most heinous of bugs and
for some reason they weren't worth patching.
For example: VS2003 C++ project references wouldn't
consistently build code correctly. So yes, you learn and
go back to the old Force using technique. However, this
is only after months of annoying intermittent problems
with multiple developers and few weeks reporting the bug
to microsoft support. All in all probably tens of
thousands of dollars wasted.. only to be told wait for
VS2005 and MsBuild.. hmm lets see that was late 2003.
I'm sorry.. VS6 SP6 was very solid when it came to
developing 32bit windows applications.
At the very least it was predictable and you knew you're
devil.
I was hopping that VS2005 was going to clean things up a
bit.
Sorry, I've already reported a bug in the VS2005 Managed
C++ compiler that is preventing the transition of
500,000 lines of C++ and C# code from VS2003 to VS2005
And for C++/CLI... Hmm.. you have to ask.. wouldn't it
have been nice to stabilize the C++ environment before
making radical changes like those involved with C++/CLI.
The only reason VS2005 isn't screwed up is because there
isn't a reasonable competitor!
Otherwise we would be using someone else's product like
SomethingElsePlusPlusCLI.NET
So, to summarize the Screw up with VS2005 is this: NO
PATCHES!
Microsoft: We need faster fixes to development tools so
we can respond to our customers in a more predictable
fashion.