What are your thoughts on VS 2005, 2008 and the coming VS 2010? What's good, bad? Discuss.
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Stuart Dootson wrote:
not as nice as in some[^]
Just out of curiosity are you running erlang in production? We've started testing it vs greenlets and stackless. Greenlets suck but I've been surprised how well stackless is standing up in the little test I've ran so far. We are planning or scaling to a larger cluster to run some more tests but there isn't enough time right now.
No - but it's had lots of use in highly parallel, high reliability systems[^]. The embedded systems I work on (at least for part of my time!) have very different requirements, which mean we use more static languages like Ada - we don't even use dynamic memory allocation! Another interesting benchmark is yaws (the erlang web server) versus Apache[^] - yes, yaws is running 80,000 parallel connections, each with an Erlang process.
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No - but it's had lots of use in highly parallel, high reliability systems[^]. The embedded systems I work on (at least for part of my time!) have very different requirements, which mean we use more static languages like Ada - we don't even use dynamic memory allocation! Another interesting benchmark is yaws (the erlang web server) versus Apache[^] - yes, yaws is running 80,000 parallel connections, each with an Erlang process.
hah....just realized I called it erlanf..... I am off my game today.
Stuart Dootson wrote:
No - but it's had lots of use in highly parallel, high reliability systems[^].
It is impressive.
Stuart Dootson wrote:
The embedded systems I work on (at least for part of my time!) have very different requirements, which mean we use more static languages like Ada - we don't even use dynamic memory allocation!
Been there, it's a whole different mentality to more common enterprise development.
Stuart Dootson wrote:
Another interesting benchmark is yaws (the erlang web server) versus Apache[^] - yes, yaws is running 80,000 parallel connections, each with an Erlang process.
Goodness! This is the first time I've heard of yaws so I'll check it out.
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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
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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
The help system should be on a separate thread. Please. The number of times I have pressed F1 accidentally and then sat there for ages while the help system loads, unable to do anything. Both 2005 and 2008 (although 2008 seems worse) fail to build with out of memory errors - it seems when there are a large number of projects / resources but it's difficult to pin down when you're doing 'real ' development rather than beta testing for MS! The Gui views often take a long time to (re)draw themselves and sometimes fail due to memory errors - which seem to go away if you get the right keypresses... e.g. Show code of Winform. Press F7 to show the gui. Get memory error Close tab (so back to the code) Press F7 to show the Gui. SOMETIMES it will work, sometimes it fails. Assume it fails: Close the tab (so back to the code) Right-click on solution explorer and select 'View Designer' USUALY it now works. (If it doesn't it's restart VS time) So - how come viewing the same GUI using two different options has a different effect? This happens at least three or four times (and sometimes many, many more) every day with our solution which contains 21 projects.
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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
Let us hope they don't shoot the messenger :) I do have a query though - what are your expectations with handing feedback to the VS team? They are probably not far from release, can much be changed at this point?
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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
VS 2008 is my favorite. But I must admit it sucked before service pack 1. It was almost unusable before they fixed the speed issues. Also, I do 90% ASP.Net and C#. The javascript debugging / object browser is light years ahead of what we had to work with in VS 2003. Also, I haven't done any WPF or Silverlight (other than playing around so I can't comment on that). VS 2005 was also very good but it lacked the javascript support in 2008. My favorite features added to 2005 / 2008 are: Search entire solution and do find replace (2003 only did a project). Add using statements by right clicking then resolve. Raw view of data is extremely useful when debugging. "Find all references" my favorite feature. The server viewer / query tool supports my as400 databases. So I can query db2 data without making a bunch of linked servers in SQL Server. This is very useful for me. Dragging stored procedures to the dbml designer and getting an method created for me via LINQ is such a huge time saver for small projects. It is just wonderful.
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modified on Wednesday, April 29, 2009 11:45 PM
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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.
Wow. A minute? My web applications are not quite that big but that is just insane. I am using Vista Business with a 3.0Gzh dual core with 3 gigs of ram and pressing F5 does not take long at all. Do you use IIS for you project or the temporary web server thingy? I often have 3 or 4 instances of Visual Studio open and I can debug with no issues. Maybe you have some large fragmented files in your project or something.
I didn't get any requirements for the signature
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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 mostly code C#/Winforms and these are my main grievances: 1. Why the hell does the system preform a full recompile on minor changes to one DLL? Items preceding it in the compile chain should not recompile. 2. I hate clicking on a form item to select it which the IDE takes as a double click and starts dealing with the control's load/click/etc method. 3. For us international developers, and I mean right to left and script languages (Arabic, Hebrew, Thai and most probably others I don't know about) are annoyed at the way the display of "Eastern" scripts went 2 steps back since VS2003. Example. I'll type Hello World in Arabic, it will type the words left to right in visual order, but the words are arranged logically, so, hello world comes out -> world, hello. Its correct to read, but the visually wrong. That's the best I can do to explain it without typing Arabic. 4. Everybody and their pet gerbil has a multi-core computer with boatloads of RAM, why won't VS2010 be a 64 bit IDE? If they're that worried about breaking backwards compatibility they could have released multiple versions, as is they've done that with Vista and they're planning on doing that with Weven. I'd rather have VS 2010 x64 and one that works to utilize my computer's multiple-cores to compile rather than have Weven Lollipop edition for my MS Mobile Device.
If the post was helpful, please vote! Current activities: Book: Foundation's Edge by Isaac Asimov Project: Hospital Automation, final stage Learning: Image analysis, LINQ Now and forever, defiant to the end. What is Multiple Sclerosis[^]?
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hah....just realized I called it erlanf..... I am off my game today.
Stuart Dootson wrote:
No - but it's had lots of use in highly parallel, high reliability systems[^].
It is impressive.
Stuart Dootson wrote:
The embedded systems I work on (at least for part of my time!) have very different requirements, which mean we use more static languages like Ada - we don't even use dynamic memory allocation!
Been there, it's a whole different mentality to more common enterprise development.
Stuart Dootson wrote:
Another interesting benchmark is yaws (the erlang web server) versus Apache[^] - yes, yaws is running 80,000 parallel connections, each with an Erlang process.
Goodness! This is the first time I've heard of yaws so I'll check it out.
Chris Austin wrote:
It is impressive. Goodness! This is the first time I've heard of yaws so I'll check it out.
IIRC, ALL Sony Ericcsson switches are actually Soft-Switches and are Erlang based. Their concurrency, parallelism, reliability and stability is nothing short of jaw dropping. I had printed stats on the stuff that I'm not sure of their physical location now since I don't use them now (no longer in the communication's industry). We're talking to the order of 100,000,000 - 1,000,000,000 simultaneous, concurrent threads/processes (calls in this case) with nothing being dropped depending on the added help of the switch processing power.
If the post was helpful, please vote! Current activities: Book: Foundation's Edge by Isaac Asimov Project: Hospital Automation, final stage Learning: Image analysis, LINQ Now and forever, defiant to the end. What is Multiple Sclerosis[^]?
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Christopher Duncan wrote:
I'll update to 2010 only at gunpoint.
Somewhere, in a Microsoft lab, in the middle of the desert, in an underground building, on a floor only reachable by facial recognition and rental scan, this comment was logged on a server, automatically cross-referenced with your name and global position, where your "case" will be assigned to a special Microsoft Public Relations team, in charge of making problems like you, "see the light". And before you can say "Microsoft .NET 5.0", you'll be singing like a fanboy in the Microsoft Choir, and you'll have their logo tattooed on the back of your head and a GUID on you buttocks. Oh yes ... you will regrete the day you said something negitive against them ... Because they are great. Everything they do is wonderful! I couldn't be happier with WPF, WCF and WWF. My life is like gold because of Microsoft technologies. All hail the MS, because they speak truth! Happiness is a Microsoft .NET compiler and a ton of XAML on my screen! Signed, 235B38BC-E7B2-48d7-A9CF-24E7C8E50875 :rolleyes:
Douglas Troy wrote:
facial recognition and rental scan
I've never heard of that one! :omg: But I really feel with your post. It is essentially, less the details that I didn't know about, how I feel and I have become completely fed up with MS and their speed crap shoveling.
If the post was helpful, please vote! Current activities: Book: Foundation's Edge by Isaac Asimov Project: Hospital Automation, final stage Learning: Image analysis, LINQ Now and forever, defiant to the end. What is Multiple Sclerosis[^]?
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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
Studio just keeps getting bigger and more bloated, it takes too long to load to a point where I can become productive and it is just way too buggy (2003, 2005 and 2008). I have to use studio where I work because I don't have a choice but personally I tend to edit code files in something like Notepad++ and then compile them in studio. I'm working on a C++ app at the moment and I hate the fact that Studio warns you that using certain functions is in-secure and that you should use the "_s" version. But these are functions outside of the standard that MS thinks are going to get implemented which sucks when trying to write cross-platform code. ASP.Net, switching to design view takes forever (and I mean get up and go make a coffee forever) and is next to useless. It seems that MS keeps on trying to add in all of these features to make it a rapid application development environment with full project life-cycle support and it's not what I want. 99% of my time all I want is something to manage a project, provide intelli-sense and compile with useful debugging support, what's so wrong with that. Get rid of the cruft and give developers a useful development environment, screw the project managers, management and anyone else who doesn't write code they don't need Studio. Here endeth the rant.
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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.
I miss the left and right buttons on the tab window bar from VS2003. Hate the drop down window list on the tab bar in VS2005 & 2008! Also love/hate the automatic formatting for C#. It's great that it indents automatically, aligns code etc, but it also rearranges my variable declarations etc. Wish there was more flexibility. Otherwise, intelli-sense and easy of editing for C# is generally quite good. For C++ on the other hand... I heard that VS2010 was built with WPF, does this imply that the UI looks nicer? Hope they didn't forget about fixing some of the underlying issues. For now though, I think I will remain skeptical :)
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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
Everything was fine until I started doing WPF apps, and then VS2008 fell flat on its face. The designer sucks, and the app itself freezes regularly and during random activities. I've even had it simply shut down with no error message. As long as I'm NOT doing WPF, it seems fine. Oh yeah, I haven't used the internal help system since I started using Visual Studio 6. It's next to useless. As far as VS2010 is concerned, I'm not looking forward to it - it's designed using WPF, which begs the question - I wonder if Microsoft improved WPF when they tried to use their own frakked up tool to code with. And having them suggest that you use a $600 tool (that they developed) as an alternative for the IDE's designer is beyond ludicrous.
"Why don't you tie a kerosene-soaked rag around your ankles so the ants won't climb up and eat your candy ass..." - Dale Earnhardt, 1997
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"...the staggering layers of obscenity in your statement make it a work of art on so many levels." - Jason Jystad, 10/26/2001 -
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 used VS2003 extensively until moving to VS2008 about a year ago. Liked VS2003; fairly stable; adequate functionality. VS2008 is very buggy; at least 2-4 crashes a day for the past year, even with all the SP's and hotfixes. SQLServerCE problems have resulted in two complete development platform disk crashes in past three months. VS2008 also seems to have eliminated some of my favorite features in VS2003; however, this may be because I simply haven't gone looking for them... I would give VS2003 an 80% grade and VS2008 about 60%; passable but definitely no improvement over previous efforts by MS. :((
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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
VS2008: Works quite well for the "old school" stuff: C++, MFC/ATL/Win32, C# WinForms. I haven't tried the new stuff with the RTM, but I fancy the observation that most "buggy crap" complaints are related to these. Whether it's better than VC6, is hard to say. To often, the system is configurable to weasel around a decision: Rather than make a decision how something should be, they gave me an option. SOunds nice on paper, but sucks. It's snappy enough on a good machine, but the UI design and implementation is certainly not excellent, which makes the biggest slowdowns for me. C++ Solution Build configuration is lauhgable (looks like designed on a round table by kindof-managerial-types). My biggest problem is that one solution config can't build two configurations of the same project in one configuration (say, an ATL and an MFC version of a library, because, oh, CString are still TWO FRACKING DIFFERENT IMPLEMENTATIONS AT RUNTIME - WHAT THE FRACK!) also, #pragma comment(lib) doesn't include the lib in the dependency check - sucks big time. Even though this works perfectly well for #include. Stupid. Support for Replacements (like $(TARGETPATH)) is very inconsistent throughout project options. For osme options they are supported, for others, they are not. Totally inconsistent and annoying. Oh, and if you want to provide feedback: The team* who designed how addins are registerd should be gagged, taken out, strangled, shot, watertortured and then forced to provide permanent instant phone and onsite support for addin installation and registration problems. This probably violates some slave labor regulations, but I really don't care. VS2010 - I've already downloaded 2/10 of the CTP, mostly to play with the new C++0x stuff. :rolleyes: The code expand/collapse stupidity I complained about is supposedly fixed for VS2010. Yay! *) I refrain to believe that a single developer would have created that useless monstrosity. The amount of brute ignorance of reality that went into this requires a team.
Don't attribute to stupidity what can be equally well explained by buerocracy.
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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
Microsoft has utterly deprecated C++ development since Visual Studio 2003, and the only positive thing of note in that version was improved language standard compliance. The C++ developer 'experience' has steadily gone downhill since VC6. Every version of Visual Studio since VC6 has advertised better C++ developer support, but it's always turned out to be a wretched lie, the cretins.
Software Zen:
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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
With both VS 2005/8 the help system sucks. Some time before 2008 was released, I answered a survey on the help system. They must have thrashed my responses, its even worse now than before. You search for a simple command, and hundreds of pages are returned on every subject under the sun. VS 2008 will just crash on occasion for no reason that I have been able to figure out as of yet. I mostly work in web design, using C# and some AJAX, and as some others have stated, switching from source to design view can take a couple of minutes. It should not take that long to build the controls. My biggest complaint with the debugger, I miss my old DOS days with the Clipper debugger, it could automatically step through the code for you. There was even a speed control. I get TIRED of having to hit the F11 key for every line of code. There are a couple of other items that changed from 05 to 08 that were actually downgrades to my way of thinking, but I've been using 08 since it came out and so use to it now, can not remember them. Just know that some of them created extra steps for me.
One day soon, I suppose I should come up with one! Something like: There are times I really miss the old DOS programming days.
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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
On large solutions (greater than 140 projects in a single solution), VS 2008 is extremely glitchey. When editing a windows form, for example, you may have to wait 20 minutes for the tools window / form to 'rebuild' before you can make changes to the form. Rebuild / builds have to be done selectively by individual project since total solution rebuild can exceed 45 minutes. Perhaps the solution level build could be smartened up ? I know this is an insane number of projects (about 150 at last count) but sometimes you have to work with what you are given. I have worked with WPF, but the VS 2008 support in the visual designer is primitive. You end up writing XAML (which is not what you want developers to be doing alot of) to gain sufficient control. I think WPF is mature but the studio support is not.
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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]
I skipped VS2005 completely and went from VS2003 to VS2008. I like 2008 better but it is dog slow to load.
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VS2008: Works quite well for the "old school" stuff: C++, MFC/ATL/Win32, C# WinForms. I haven't tried the new stuff with the RTM, but I fancy the observation that most "buggy crap" complaints are related to these. Whether it's better than VC6, is hard to say. To often, the system is configurable to weasel around a decision: Rather than make a decision how something should be, they gave me an option. SOunds nice on paper, but sucks. It's snappy enough on a good machine, but the UI design and implementation is certainly not excellent, which makes the biggest slowdowns for me. C++ Solution Build configuration is lauhgable (looks like designed on a round table by kindof-managerial-types). My biggest problem is that one solution config can't build two configurations of the same project in one configuration (say, an ATL and an MFC version of a library, because, oh, CString are still TWO FRACKING DIFFERENT IMPLEMENTATIONS AT RUNTIME - WHAT THE FRACK!) also, #pragma comment(lib) doesn't include the lib in the dependency check - sucks big time. Even though this works perfectly well for #include. Stupid. Support for Replacements (like $(TARGETPATH)) is very inconsistent throughout project options. For osme options they are supported, for others, they are not. Totally inconsistent and annoying. Oh, and if you want to provide feedback: The team* who designed how addins are registerd should be gagged, taken out, strangled, shot, watertortured and then forced to provide permanent instant phone and onsite support for addin installation and registration problems. This probably violates some slave labor regulations, but I really don't care. VS2010 - I've already downloaded 2/10 of the CTP, mostly to play with the new C++0x stuff. :rolleyes: The code expand/collapse stupidity I complained about is supposedly fixed for VS2010. Yay! *) I refrain to believe that a single developer would have created that useless monstrosity. The amount of brute ignorance of reality that went into this requires a team.
Don't attribute to stupidity what can be equally well explained by buerocracy.
My latest article | Linkify!| FoldWithUs! | sighistpeterchen wrote:
Oh, and if you want to provide feedback: The team* who designed how addins are registerd should be gagged, taken out, strangled, shot, watertortured and then forced to provide permanent instant phone and onsite support for addin installation and registration problems. This probably violates some slave labor regulations, but I really don't care.
:laugh: Can we add the creators of the help system to this?
John