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
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[^].
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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:
Anna-Jayne Metcalfe wrote:
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.
You can still use Boost's threading library - that's close enough to C++0x (no surprise, given Anthony's got significant responsibility for it) and makes concurrency almost pleasant to use (not as nice as in some[^] languages[^], though).
Anna-Jayne Metcalfe wrote:
VS2010 has a new WPF based code editor. I'm expecting it to be very pretty, but slow and unstable
The beta was pretty enough, not slow and not unstable (forgive the double negative - the Staropramen must be getting to me).
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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
1. I haven't bothered installing MSDN since VS 2003, and even then it was pointless. I miss DevStudio 4. :sigh: 2. Debugging ASP.NET is still more painful than it should be, mostly because if you don't have your website as your base directory then the temporary debug webserver gets scared and confused. 3. The ASP.NET designer. Kinda got sick of it saying it couldn't create my controls so gave up on it a looong time ago. 4. Refactoring and searching for references. Seriously guys: This is beyond pitiful in terms of performance. At least Microsoft is keeping JetBrains and WholeTomato in business. 5. Debugging javascript has a long way to go. 6. Please, please stop building everything when I only change a semi-colon in a single file at the top of the dependancy stack. 7. Do you really need to lock up the entire IDE if one of projects needs to be reloaded? Really? Overall I like VS 2008 way more than 2005 but they really do need to get the multithreading sorted out. It looks up way too often.
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Anna-Jayne Metcalfe wrote:
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.
You can still use Boost's threading library - that's close enough to C++0x (no surprise, given Anthony's got significant responsibility for it) and makes concurrency almost pleasant to use (not as nice as in some[^] languages[^], though).
Anna-Jayne Metcalfe wrote:
VS2010 has a new WPF based code editor. I'm expecting it to be very pretty, but slow and unstable
The beta was pretty enough, not slow and not unstable (forgive the double negative - the Staropramen must be getting to me).
Stuart Dootson wrote:
You can still use Boost's threading library - that's close enough to C++0x (no surprise, given Anthony's got significant responsibility for it) and makes concurrency almost pleasant to use (not as nice as in some[^] languages[^], though).
Actually, Anthony now has a representative implementation of the real thing availablenow (we sat in on his session on it at the ACCU Conference ast week, and I have to say it was very informative). My main regret with this particular part of the standard is that it wasn't around 5 years ago, but then that's just me. :doh:
Stuart Dootson wrote:
The beta was pretty enough, not slow and not unstable (forgive the double negative - the Staropramen must be getting to me).
We've been working with the CTP for a few months now. I haven't seen the beta yet - I wasn't aware it was out yet! :-\
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Stuart Dootson wrote:
You can still use Boost's threading library - that's close enough to C++0x (no surprise, given Anthony's got significant responsibility for it) and makes concurrency almost pleasant to use (not as nice as in some[^] languages[^], though).
Actually, Anthony now has a representative implementation of the real thing availablenow (we sat in on his session on it at the ACCU Conference ast week, and I have to say it was very informative). My main regret with this particular part of the standard is that it wasn't around 5 years ago, but then that's just me. :doh:
Stuart Dootson wrote:
The beta was pretty enough, not slow and not unstable (forgive the double negative - the Staropramen must be getting to me).
We've been working with the CTP for a few months now. I haven't seen the beta yet - I wasn't aware it was out yet! :-\
Anna-Jayne Metcalfe wrote:
We've been working with the CTP for a few months now. I haven't seen the beta yet - I wasn't aware it was out yet!
Sorry - I meant the CTP. As I said - Staropramen! :-D Anyway - beta, CTP, RTM - they're all much the same with MS software :laugh:
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1. I haven't bothered installing MSDN since VS 2003, and even then it was pointless. I miss DevStudio 4. :sigh: 2. Debugging ASP.NET is still more painful than it should be, mostly because if you don't have your website as your base directory then the temporary debug webserver gets scared and confused. 3. The ASP.NET designer. Kinda got sick of it saying it couldn't create my controls so gave up on it a looong time ago. 4. Refactoring and searching for references. Seriously guys: This is beyond pitiful in terms of performance. At least Microsoft is keeping JetBrains and WholeTomato in business. 5. Debugging javascript has a long way to go. 6. Please, please stop building everything when I only change a semi-colon in a single file at the top of the dependancy stack. 7. Do you really need to lock up the entire IDE if one of projects needs to be reloaded? Really? Overall I like VS 2008 way more than 2005 but they really do need to get the multithreading sorted out. It looks up way too often.
Chris Maunder wrote:
I miss DevStudio 4.
I feel your pain Chris. VS5 was a rude shock for me! :-\
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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.
my VS05 help always brings up help for SQL server, if i press F1. always. no matter what. no, i never do anything in VS05 which requires SQL help on demand. it is awesome in a kind of absurd, Dadaist, surreal way. it sometimes makes me laugh, even!
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Shog9 wrote:
Either make the MSDN integrated help work, or drop it entirely.
my VS05 help always brings up help for SQL server, if i press F1. always. no matter what. no, i never do anything in VS05 which requires SQL help on demand. it is awesome in a kind of absurd, Dadaist, surreal way. it sometimes makes me laugh, even!
I used to get foxpro help when working on MFC code. I say used because I no longer use the integrated help. A google search is so much better help for VS.
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Anna-Jayne Metcalfe wrote:
We've been working with the CTP for a few months now. I haven't seen the beta yet - I wasn't aware it was out yet!
Sorry - I meant the CTP. As I said - Staropramen! :-D Anyway - beta, CTP, RTM - they're all much the same with MS software :laugh:
Stuart Dootson wrote:
Sorry - I meant the CTP. As I said - Staropramen!
I'll see your Staropramen and raise you three Grimbergens.... ;)
Stuart Dootson wrote:
Anyway - beta, CTP, RTM - they're all much the same with MS software
As far as I'm concerned VS2005 RTM was actually Beta 3, and we're still waiting for the production code! :doh: We've ported our code to the VS2010 CTP to see what broke (a fair bit in the project files, which wasn't unexpected) but the add-in interfaces seem to be working reasonably OK. However I've not tried actually editing code in it (particularly not on a laptop, which is always the killer test) yet. We'll see.
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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: 2008 / C# / ASP.NET / Web Application My biggest complaint is the completely ridiculous wait time when hitting F5 to debug. I have two projects, one in 2005, one in 2008. They're almost identical in number of .aspx pages (~90) and number of user controls (~60). In both scenarios, the actual compilation is fast, and the web browser pops up in a couple of seconds. What happens next is the difference between a painful experience and a workable one. In 2005, it takes a few seconds for the JIT compilation, and then the site is up and available for debugging. In 2008, however, it runs around a minute or so, perhaps longer. Doesn't seem to matter how much or how little code I change, debugging in 2008 is a horrible experience because I spend most of my time staring at the screen instead of working. Because of this, I regret doing the new project in 2008 and look forward to working in 2005. Which wouldn't be so bad if I wasn't paying serious money for the pleasure. I second a comment above that this product shows serious signs of apathy. With the death of Borland ages ago as a serious bit of compiler competition and no one else to provide a C#/.NET development environment to keep them honest, MS doesn't seem to be terribly concerned about quality. Because of this, I'll update to 2010 only at gunpoint.
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1. I haven't bothered installing MSDN since VS 2003, and even then it was pointless. I miss DevStudio 4. :sigh: 2. Debugging ASP.NET is still more painful than it should be, mostly because if you don't have your website as your base directory then the temporary debug webserver gets scared and confused. 3. The ASP.NET designer. Kinda got sick of it saying it couldn't create my controls so gave up on it a looong time ago. 4. Refactoring and searching for references. Seriously guys: This is beyond pitiful in terms of performance. At least Microsoft is keeping JetBrains and WholeTomato in business. 5. Debugging javascript has a long way to go. 6. Please, please stop building everything when I only change a semi-colon in a single file at the top of the dependancy stack. 7. Do you really need to lock up the entire IDE if one of projects needs to be reloaded? Really? Overall I like VS 2008 way more than 2005 but they really do need to get the multithreading sorted out. It looks up way too often.
I miss Visual C++ 6. Web development is a painful experience, even without the obvious lack of quality control in MS dev tools.