VS2008 stability [modified]

[Joe Woodbury]

At my work, we recently had a conversation about VS 2005 stability. It seems that on some systems doing some tasks, it will crash quite often. Yet, for others of us, it's either never crashed or crashed once in a way that can't be directly attributable to something specific (like working with Windows Mobile and having it go freaky while doing an ActiveSync transfer or by terminating a debug session wrong.) One common thread is the people with the most crashes are doing ASP.NET development using Dell Vostro thin systems. Those with the least are doing more C++ and .NET client development on non Vostro systems. My guess is that it has to do with video drivers and something with UI elements specific to ASP.NET. My second guess is that it's some sort of add-on that the ASP people are using but which the others of us aren't.

Anyone who thinks he has a better idea of what's good for people than people do is a swine. - P.J. O'Rourke

[Michael Dunn]

At my current job, I've used 2005 a lot and aside from being dog-slow at building the NCB file (which I've come to expect) it's actually been quite stable. I still wouldn't want to write a big project from scratch in it though due to all the usability annoyances.

--Mike-- Visual C++ MVP :cool: LINKS~! Ericahist | PimpFish | CP SearchBar v3.0 | C++ Forum FAQ

[Mycroft Holmes]

Marc Clifton wrote:

yes, this file contains the string

Thank you for that, I needed a chuckle this morning. Reminds me of what a BA told me when working with Japanese, their answer of "yes" actually means yes they heard you, not that they understood what you said.

Never underestimate the power of human stupidity RAH

[JamesHurst]

The release version - not at all. But once I installed the SP1 Beta, it crashes about once a day. Sometimes erratically, and there is one pattern that reproduces consistently: whenever I try to change the command-line argument for it to pass to my program on launch, VS 2008 simply disappears instantly. Thus I'm utterly unable to set launch options. :^)

James Hurst "The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated."
Mahatma Gandhi

[Priyatam K]

Chris Maunder wrote:

Is it just me? [Frown]

Yes...just you ;P

[Robsie]

I had 4 or more lockups a day for around 3 weeks when doing ASP.NET development, not only would it lock up, but in the wonderful wisdom embedded into vista, I couldn't kill it. Sometimes it would be WebDev, sometimes the IDE. I had to reboot, which took forever as vista was still waiting for the "Gracefull" exit. :mad: It turned out that not long before then I had installed zone alarm basic / free version. I should have put two together sooner, but in an attempt to rid myself of the problem I removed not only zone alarm but avast. I replaced them with the free comodo firewall and have not had a lock up since. I believe it was zone alarm that caused the problem. Just thought this may help you, also I have installed the VS2008 hotfix rollup which has fixes for ASP.NET dev. nJoy.

[pg az]

Marc Clifton wrote:

Oh good grief. I have to actually set this behavior as an option? [Sigh]

An occasionally useful one - I just searched all of my files to see which ones contained any "ifdef", not wanting to see the details of each file. With a "pipe" option I could write a macro to see which files contained NO ifdefs... "Extensibility" in other words beats exhaustively implementing all possible options, well at least Microsoft is partially there with the add-ins and stuff. But to straightforwardly be able to tweak the find-in-files, how often would THAT be cool ?

pg--az

[pg az]

Matthew Faithfull wrote:

tend to get very cranky on the fortunately fairly rare occassions when it tells lies

About a week ago find-in-files totally broke - it would ALWAYS say something like "search stopped at user request", and say that IMMEDIATELY. So I rebooted with a "chkdsk" and doing that and nothing else completely repaired whatever the problem was. At a guess the chkdsk was needless and it was merely some internal-memory-corruption - anyway if it happens to YOU, don't have a heart attack, just reboot. I was panicked myself, I had no idea whether a complete reinstall would be needed - like Joel says 'users so often reinstall when they accidentally tweak system settings, because they know how to do that better than they know how to isolate what they tweaked'.

pg--az

[christhecoder]

I had a similar problem on my old work machine doing .NET Compact Framework development, except it crashed every 15 minutes. VS2005 was fine on that machine, but doing anything in the forms designer in VS2008 on the same machine kept crashing it or taking 3 minutes to sort itself out with every change I made (eg. when I dropped a control on the form or changed a property). Since it was a .NET CF 3.5 project I was working on it was a very painful project to do. But I couldn't find other machines with the same problem or any report about it on the web so it must have been something to do with the configuration of my machine or the software I had installed. I was happy when that project was over. Chris Anderson Peer Placements My Blog

[JohnEllenden]

Mine crashes frequently as well. I think there's some major problems with the XAML designer window. It doesn't react very well if you rebuild your controls whilst a window which is using them is open.

[DariusLegion]

I've had this experience because of versions of plug-ins that wasn´t compatible to VS2008, for example SourceGear Vault 3.5

[Machaira]

Must just be you. I can't recreate the scenario you posted and VS 2008 hasn't crashed on me once yet.

[Leftyfarrell]

I'm using Vista Business and VS2008 with SP1 Beta installed. It does crash sometimes, maybe every 4 days (I usually don't shut down and restart every day but leave windows open so I know where I left off). The biggest issue for me is intellisense that stops working completely. The only thing that I know that fixes this so far is restarting visual studio.

[DetroitJ]

With the work I have been doing, ASP.NET/C#, 2008 seems to be a bit better than 2005. My gripe is with the rendering engne in the ASPX designer. I have a Theme and a StyleSheetTheme assigned to most of my pages and I get a stupid message about "This page contains invalid blah blah blah". However clicking on the refresh button makes the error go away until the next time I load the page. Couldn't VS just handle that better? I am going to be getting rid of the themes in my apps in favor of pure CSS but what a bother in the meantime.

[Paul Sanders the other one]

Just cancel the build and restart it. At least, this works for me (in C++ projects). I find that the debugger hangs periodically (again in C++ projects), and in such a way to also hang Explorer. The only solution is to kill devenv.exe, which you have to do from the command line as Explorer is not available. Bye bye context, breakpoints, bookmarks, watched variables etc :( I would upgrade to VS 2008 but the Edit 'n Continue feature is broken - it works but does not report compiler errors. This is a show-stopper for me as I use Edit 'n Continue extensively.

Paul Sanders http://www.alpinesoft.co.uk

[Paul Sanders the other one]

damnhotfix surely

Paul Sanders http://www.alpinesoft.co.uk

[Tomz_KV]

The major improvement needed, in my opinion, is the inaccuracy of error messages. Whenever a small syntax error occurs in code during debugging, hundreds of errors show up. Fixing that one syntax error, all errors are gone.

TOMZ_KV

[dino t socrates]

It's definitely not just you. I'm finally learning ASP.NET after years of straight C# and Windows Forms programming, and VS 2008 crashes on me all the time - up to a few times a day sometimes. I have no idea how stable VS 2005 was when it came to ASP.NET, but I could probably count on one or two hands how many times VS has ever crashed on me before doing ASP. Terry

[ClockMeister]

Tomz_KV wrote:

The major improvement needed, in my opinion, is the inaccuracy of error messages. Whenever a small syntax error occurs in code during debugging, hundreds of errors show up. Fixing that one syntax error, all errors are gone.

Cascading error-messages at compile time has always been an issue, particularly with C/C++. The only really valid "fix" for that would be to have the compiler give up on the first problem it finds which might not necessarily be a bad thing, however the intent is to try to point out as many things at one time as possible. Many times (as you have seen) one error causes the next to happen, so on and so on. I doubt you'll see this go away. -CB :D

[Dan Neely]

Hot fixes are treated as beta quality updates by MS for a reason. :laugh:

Today's lesson is brought to you by the word "niggardly". Remember kids, don't attribute to racism what can be explained by Scandinavian language roots. -- Robert Royall