What are your thoughts on VS 2005, 2008 and the coming VS 2010? What's good, bad? Discuss.
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What got fixed, what should have been fixed? What's great and what's a disaster? What's your favorite version of VS? Honestly curious to know -- will be visiting MSFT last week and would like to take along some feedback. Witticisms welcomed but thoughtful answers are more helpful. thanks jeff
I only really program C++ in VS. I never really used VS2005 - I could see no reason to move from VS2003. VS2008 has some nice features, so that's what I tend to use for new projects now...but it can be insanely slow at times (project wizard, class wizard, debugging, especially starting/stopping/stepping). I tried the VS2010 beta a bit and it did seem to have better performance...and C++ 0x features, which makes it a keeper for me!
Jeff Hadfield wrote:
will be visiting MSFT last week
Bit late then, really ;P
Java, Basic, who cares - it's all a bunch of tree-hugging hippy cr*p
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Features that are en/disabled based on the language chosen, not user settings. For examples: 1 VB.NET's compile as you type feature to identify more errors as the code is typed in. This is useful in small projects regardless of the language, and sucks in large projects regardless of language (becomes too CPU intensive). 2 The task list;s handling of //TODO comments is different in VB, C#, and C++. In VB it shows TODO's for every file in the solution. In C# it only shows //TODO's for files that are open. In C++ it only shows them for the file that's being edited. Only the VB implementation makes the feature practical in larger applications because opening dozens of files is a major PITA. The only work around is to use the
#warningpre-processor directive. 3 Related to 2, why can't I display both comment and user task TODO items on a single list?It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains. -- Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
I don't know about C++ but in general there are too many inconsistencies in behaviour between C# and VB, especially in the editor. C# integration is much smoother.
Kevin
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I only really program C++ in VS. I never really used VS2005 - I could see no reason to move from VS2003. VS2008 has some nice features, so that's what I tend to use for new projects now...but it can be insanely slow at times (project wizard, class wizard, debugging, especially starting/stopping/stepping). I tried the VS2010 beta a bit and it did seem to have better performance...and C++ 0x features, which makes it a keeper for me!
Jeff Hadfield wrote:
will be visiting MSFT last week
Bit late then, really ;P
Java, Basic, who cares - it's all a bunch of tree-hugging hippy cr*p
Stuart Dootson wrote:
.but it can be insanely slow at times
Intellisense is a nightmare on large solutions. I mean ones with 20 + projects and 500K lines. I wish I could completely remove it and use visualasssist but then you have no class view.
John
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Stuart Dootson wrote:
.but it can be insanely slow at times
Intellisense is a nightmare on large solutions. I mean ones with 20 + projects and 500K lines. I wish I could completely remove it and use visualasssist but then you have no class view.
John
John M. Drescher wrote:
Intellisense is a nightmare on large solutions. I mean ones with 20 + projects and 500K lines
Yeah, I've got nothing that big - 18 projects and 100kloc is as big as I've got.
John M. Drescher wrote:
I wish I could completely remove it and use visualasssist
That I can agree with....
Java, Basic, who cares - it's all a bunch of tree-hugging hippy cr*p
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I don't know about C++ but in general there are too many inconsistencies in behaviour between C# and VB, especially in the editor. C# integration is much smoother.
Kevin
From what I've heard C++ is crapped on in all sorts of ways. I only mentioned the one instance because I read about it while WTFing on the C# behavior.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains. -- Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
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What got fixed, what should have been fixed? What's great and what's a disaster? What's your favorite version of VS? Honestly curious to know -- will be visiting MSFT last week and would like to take along some feedback. Witticisms welcomed but thoughtful answers are more helpful. thanks jeff
VS2003 seemed to be much more stable than VS2008. Rarely used VS2005, only had the Express versions, so that is not a fair comparison. For the size of projects that I do, Intellisense is good in 2008. On a very brief period of experimentation, WPF seems to be pretty much a disaster. The sort of errors a newbie would make are almost certain to crash/lock VS. I don't know if they do one, haven't searched, but there really ought to be a version of the 'Build a Program NOW!' book series for WPF. [edit] Yeah, nearly forgot. The help system is a total disaster. In 9 months I've had to reinstall at least 6 times and it's still broken (broken or missing links), I've given up reinstalling and use Google instead it's quicker and gives mostly the same results and loads of extra ones. Integrating the help from add-ins is almost certain to break it, even ones from MS sites. [/edit]
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I only really program C++ in VS. I never really used VS2005 - I could see no reason to move from VS2003. VS2008 has some nice features, so that's what I tend to use for new projects now...but it can be insanely slow at times (project wizard, class wizard, debugging, especially starting/stopping/stepping). I tried the VS2010 beta a bit and it did seem to have better performance...and C++ 0x features, which makes it a keeper for me!
Jeff Hadfield wrote:
will be visiting MSFT last week
Bit late then, really ;P
Java, Basic, who cares - it's all a bunch of tree-hugging hippy cr*p
Stuart Dootson wrote:
I tried the VS2010 beta a bit and it did seem to have better performance...and C++ 0x features, which makes it a keeper for me!
You mean MS has followed through and ten is the new six. :omg: :cool:
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains. -- Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
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What got fixed, what should have been fixed? What's great and what's a disaster? What's your favorite version of VS? Honestly curious to know -- will be visiting MSFT last week and would like to take along some feedback. Witticisms welcomed but thoughtful answers are more helpful. thanks jeff
Jeff Hadfield wrote:
What's great and what's a disaster?
If this is and honest request for comments I will say that the issues we had with VS2005 motivated our company to stop developing and deploying .net products. MS support was very helpful in supplying special download patches that were not public at the time. But, we still had too many issues with VS crashing during compile time or when loading projects that we moved away from the platform and canceled our partner program membership.
Sovereign ingredient for a happy marriage: Pay cash or do without. Interest charges not only eat up a household budget; awareness of debt eats up domestic felicity. --Lazarus Long Avoid the crowd. Do your own thinking independently. Be the chess player, not the chess piece. --Ralph Charell
modified on Wednesday, April 29, 2009 5:05 PM
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Stuart Dootson wrote:
I tried the VS2010 beta a bit and it did seem to have better performance...and C++ 0x features, which makes it a keeper for me!
You mean MS has followed through and ten is the new six. :omg: :cool:
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains. -- Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
dan neely wrote:
You mean MS has followed through and ten is the new six
What - a non-standard C++ compiler with a shonky user interface? ;P I was quite keen on VC6...when it was an upgrade from VC5. However, pretty soon after that, I was using Boost, so the compiler's inadequacies (and the linker's, for that matter) were a major pain for me. VS2003 was (for me) the VC++ that made the biggest difference to my working life. Having said that, it's quite difficult to go back to it now that I've used VS2008 pretty much exclusively for almost a year. There are so many things missing from it - only little things, but I notice they're not there!
Java, Basic, who cares - it's all a bunch of tree-hugging hippy cr*p
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From what I've heard C++ is crapped on in all sorts of ways. I only mentioned the one instance because I read about it while WTFing on the C# behavior.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains. -- Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
Re: C++, apparently 10 is the new 6. Let's see.
Kevin
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What got fixed, what should have been fixed? What's great and what's a disaster? What's your favorite version of VS? Honestly curious to know -- will be visiting MSFT last week and would like to take along some feedback. Witticisms welcomed but thoughtful answers are more helpful. thanks jeff
Jeff Hadfield wrote:
great and what's a disaster
My comments regard VS2008. I second Christian. The WPF designer is too buggy. I especially like the crashing with the IDE just shutting down without any warning at all. I am not really impressed the IDE recompiling the program all the time whether you change anything or not. The help system is waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too slow and there are way too many "information not found" pages showing up. Google is a better help system than what comes with the IDE. But that should not come as a real surprise.
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dan neely wrote:
You mean MS has followed through and ten is the new six
What - a non-standard C++ compiler with a shonky user interface? ;P I was quite keen on VC6...when it was an upgrade from VC5. However, pretty soon after that, I was using Boost, so the compiler's inadequacies (and the linker's, for that matter) were a major pain for me. VS2003 was (for me) the VC++ that made the biggest difference to my working life. Having said that, it's quite difficult to go back to it now that I've used VS2008 pretty much exclusively for almost a year. There are so many things missing from it - only little things, but I notice they're not there!
Java, Basic, who cares - it's all a bunch of tree-hugging hippy cr*p
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dan neely wrote:
You mean MS has followed through and ten is the new six
What - a non-standard C++ compiler with a shonky user interface? ;P I was quite keen on VC6...when it was an upgrade from VC5. However, pretty soon after that, I was using Boost, so the compiler's inadequacies (and the linker's, for that matter) were a major pain for me. VS2003 was (for me) the VC++ that made the biggest difference to my working life. Having said that, it's quite difficult to go back to it now that I've used VS2008 pretty much exclusively for almost a year. There are so many things missing from it - only little things, but I notice they're not there!
Java, Basic, who cares - it's all a bunch of tree-hugging hippy cr*p
Stuart Dootson wrote:
VS2003 was (for me) the VC++ that made the biggest difference to my working life.
To me this had mixed benefits. I mean the help system has been hopelessly broken since VC6. The class wizard and wizards that help you add functions and window messages do not work well at all for C++ projects and still crash visual studio (well they do in 2005). I have given up on the add Function part of class view since there is a random chance that it will either take 2 minutes to return or completely crash visual studio. Much quicker to click on the header file add the member manually (wow I can still type) and have visual assist add the implementation in the source file.
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Please don't hold me responsible for MS marketing slogans.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains. -- Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
No way I'd do that - no one who frequents CP could come up with such hokey nonsense as MS marketing.
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What got fixed, what should have been fixed? What's great and what's a disaster? What's your favorite version of VS? Honestly curious to know -- will be visiting MSFT last week and would like to take along some feedback. Witticisms welcomed but thoughtful answers are more helpful. thanks jeff
Context: C# / WPF developer I really found VS2005 to be a buggy nightmare, especially when it came to big solutions and VS2008 fixed quite a few things for me in that department. Overall it was a much smoother experience. WPF development was a joke, got *a little* better with SP1 but still isn't a viable alternative to Blend (and would be obsolete with comparison to Blend 3 if it wasn't for Resharper). I'm having high hopes for 2010, but given the fact that there's so much new stuff in it, I'm somewhat sceptical, but I guess I'll hop on before the thing goes RTM anyway. Let's hope for the best ;)
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What got fixed, what should have been fixed? What's great and what's a disaster? What's your favorite version of VS? Honestly curious to know -- will be visiting MSFT last week and would like to take along some feedback. Witticisms welcomed but thoughtful answers are more helpful. thanks jeff
A big subject, and not one I've got the braincells to do justice to right now. Some of my thoughts:
- VS2005 is (and has been since Beta 1) a dog for add-in developers.
- VS2008 is better (esp. with the TR1 bits) but broke move stuff under the hood (try any of the Evaluate() calls in the VCProjectEngine interfaces).
- VS2010 should have a fair few of the C++ 0x features (I'm especially looking forward to Lambdas, which finally make std::for_each usable) but I don't know whether the new threading support (Anthony William's presentation at the ACCU COnference was a great introduction to the subject) or futures will make it in. If they don't that will be a huge missed opportunity.
- VS2010 introduces a new MSBuild compatible (.vcxproj) project file format. That's a pain for us, and will make diffing with .vcproj files for previous versions impossible. Jury out on that one...
- VS2010 has a new WPF based code editor. I'm expecting it to be very pretty, but slow and unstable. We'll see.
My bet's on the release after VS2010 (VS2012?) being the stable one of the pair. As the saying goes "We live in interesting times". :rolleyes:
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What got fixed, what should have been fixed? What's great and what's a disaster? What's your favorite version of VS? Honestly curious to know -- will be visiting MSFT last week and would like to take along some feedback. Witticisms welcomed but thoughtful answers are more helpful. thanks jeff
I use VC++6 and VS2005 at work and VS2008 at home. Most my work is in C++ with some C# (mostly non-forms support assemblies.) I find the VS2008 C++ compiler and linker are slightly better than the one in VS2005. (Ironically, for non-template, basic C++, the VC++6 compiler produces smaller, tighter, faster code that later iterations, though the CRT in the VS200x have a faster memory manager which can compensate.) When using VS200x, I really miss the class wizard from VC++6, the VC++6 IDE is zippier and linking in VS2008 can be really slow, but I prefer everything else about the VS200x line. My own recommendation is that if you have VS2008 use it, but don't buy it otherwise. And despite all their promises, the VS2010 preview was a major disappointment for me. That's not unusual and I've no doubt I'll switch to VS2010 for C++ if I get a freebie.
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What got fixed, what should have been fixed? What's great and what's a disaster? What's your favorite version of VS? Honestly curious to know -- will be visiting MSFT last week and would like to take along some feedback. Witticisms welcomed but thoughtful answers are more helpful. thanks jeff
VS2005: Reasonably stable post-SP1, solid C++ dev environment, adequate for .NET, painfully slow editor. VS2008: Improved native debugger, improved JavaScript debugger, some additional stability issues, painfully slow editor. VS2010: Haven't played with it yet. If the editor is faster, i'll forgive a lot. I do mostly C++, some .NET 2.0, a little .NET 3.5, but no WPF (played with it for a while, found unpleasantly verbose to write by hand and unpleasantly unstable to use the designer). I don't rely on wizards / property pages when writing C++ code, and have no real desire to see any of the half-baked VC6 hand-holding brought back - if they want to do something to lessen the drudgery, adding some fast, working refactoring tools would do nicely. I would love to see MS actually follow through with WPF rather than toying with it for a few years before moving on to something new, but only if they provide proper support for it from C++ (native or /CLI) - i'm talking about tooling here, not the underlying libraries. Memory footprint while debugging is obscene. Symbol loading is incredibly dodgy; WinDBG is more reliable. Either make the MSDN integrated help work, or drop it entirely. Right now, shipping with F1 mapped to
http://www.google.com/search?q={SELECTION}+site%3Amsdn.microsoft.comwould be a huge improvement. I would love to see proper Intellisense for C++; I neither have nor want this from 3rd-party add-ons (rather than making a slow editor even slower, why not just pay for a better editor?). VS2005 improved a lot over previous versions, but still manages to get confused and completely stop working all too frequently. Don't drop support for .NET 2.0, or I won't use it. It took ages to get that as a deployed baseline, and frankly i have no desire to debug installation issues with 3.5. Oh... And i don't have a favorite version. VS2005 is the one i use 80-90% of the time these days, so it's simultaneously the one i like the best and the one i hate the most. -
VS2005: Reasonably stable post-SP1, solid C++ dev environment, adequate for .NET, painfully slow editor. VS2008: Improved native debugger, improved JavaScript debugger, some additional stability issues, painfully slow editor. VS2010: Haven't played with it yet. If the editor is faster, i'll forgive a lot. I do mostly C++, some .NET 2.0, a little .NET 3.5, but no WPF (played with it for a while, found unpleasantly verbose to write by hand and unpleasantly unstable to use the designer). I don't rely on wizards / property pages when writing C++ code, and have no real desire to see any of the half-baked VC6 hand-holding brought back - if they want to do something to lessen the drudgery, adding some fast, working refactoring tools would do nicely. I would love to see MS actually follow through with WPF rather than toying with it for a few years before moving on to something new, but only if they provide proper support for it from C++ (native or /CLI) - i'm talking about tooling here, not the underlying libraries. Memory footprint while debugging is obscene. Symbol loading is incredibly dodgy; WinDBG is more reliable. Either make the MSDN integrated help work, or drop it entirely. Right now, shipping with F1 mapped to
http://www.google.com/search?q={SELECTION}+site%3Amsdn.microsoft.comwould be a huge improvement. I would love to see proper Intellisense for C++; I neither have nor want this from 3rd-party add-ons (rather than making a slow editor even slower, why not just pay for a better editor?). VS2005 improved a lot over previous versions, but still manages to get confused and completely stop working all too frequently. Don't drop support for .NET 2.0, or I won't use it. It took ages to get that as a deployed baseline, and frankly i have no desire to debug installation issues with 3.5. Oh... And i don't have a favorite version. VS2005 is the one i use 80-90% of the time these days, so it's simultaneously the one i like the best and the one i hate the most.Shog9 wrote:
Either make the MSDN integrated help work, or drop it entirely. Right now, shipping with F1 mapped to http://www.google.com/search?q={SELECTION}+site%3Amsdn.microsoft.com would be a huge improvement.
:laugh: Exactly.
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Stuart Dootson wrote:
VS2003 was (for me) the VC++ that made the biggest difference to my working life.
To me this had mixed benefits. I mean the help system has been hopelessly broken since VC6. The class wizard and wizards that help you add functions and window messages do not work well at all for C++ projects and still crash visual studio (well they do in 2005). I have given up on the add Function part of class view since there is a random chance that it will either take 2 minutes to return or completely crash visual studio. Much quicker to click on the header file add the member manually (wow I can still type) and have visual assist add the implementation in the source file.
My C++ has always been more C++ than MFC (my UIs have tended to be in Qt or WTL), so the fact that the class wizard and adding methods are pretty much broken hasn't made much difference to me. And fortunately, STL terms are unique enough that the help system still works OK for me. But having used VS + MFC to write sample code to answer CP queries, I totally agree with you that VS is pretty much totally broken in that respect. The one that I got bitten by most recently was IE8 breaking VS2008's code wizards[^].