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
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! | sighist -
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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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:
delete this;
Fold With Us![^] -
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
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We've not finished exploring vs 2008 and they are talking abt 2010. I beleive its just a remodelling/repackaging of what we already have in 08. ________________________________________________________________________________________ Cheap Affordable Web Hosting & Design | Best PHP Linux Hosting | ASP.NET Windows Hosting
mbaocha wrote:
I beleive its just a remodelling/repackaging of what we already have in 08.
I find that very interesting. Could you elaborate on that a little bit? - Phil
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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
It's a pain how in VS 2005 irrelevant windows (such as properties) sometimes shoot out of auto-hide mode at random times, and you have to wait for them to go away.
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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
Our solution has 38 projects mixed between C# and VB, no speed problem with Intellisense. VS2005. -CB
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I skipped VS2005 completely and went from VS2003 to VS2008. I like 2008 better but it is dog slow to load.
That about sums up my experience. Except for more instability in 2008.
Henry Minute Do not read medical books! You could die of a misprint. - Mark Twain Girl: (staring) "Why do you need an icy cucumber?" “I want to report a fraud. The government is lying to us all.”
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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:
delete this;
Fold With Us![^]Yes, they have definitely forgotten about C++ development. I think it was 2008 that was supposed to have been an answer to C++ concerns, but that version stinks, too: Nearly usless help, intermittent intellisense, no new support for C++/CLI, embarrassing "Class Wizard" dialog, etc. They definitely must have had a change in the Visual Studio team (maybe they outsourced it) because the quality has really suffered lately. Even C# stuff: The project properties dialog is laughable (I could draw it by hand faster) and why can't I redirect object file output? The dumbest thing they did, though, was not follow up with C++/CLI support. They finally had something that could let people ease into .Net and simplify their work by sticking with one language and they all but abandoned it. Try creating any new web service with C++. Or, if you have one, try debugging it - you can't because Visual Studio won't let you. My theory for what went wrong is that Microsoft decided to put Visual Studio under the control of whoever it was who thought it was a good idea (way back when) for Visual Basic to have no main client window. I think the price of getting him to finally make it work like a resonable editor was to give him control of the newer versions.
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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[^]?
Mustafa Ismail Mustafa wrote:
facial recognition and rental scan
hahaha ... it was late, I was tired and the dementia had firmly set in ... :-D
:..::. Douglas H. Troy ::..
Bad Astronomy |VCF|wxWidgets|WTL -
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
Actually, given the size of stuff some folks here work on, I don't even consider these to be very big projects. Of course, everyone's heard me whining about this issue for a while now, and many have insinuated that I must have an inferior box / bad configuration / bad karma / whatever. In fact, the 2005 and 2008 projects are extremely similar in nature, so this is the perfect apples to apples comparison. I'm using both exactly the same way. 2005 works normally. 2008 is almost unusably slow. And yeah. A minute is just insane.
Christopher Duncan Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes www.PracticalUSA.com
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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
Thanks, everyone. These are very helpful. I'm taking these to Redmond next week. If you think of any more, please don't hesitate to add! jeff
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Mustafa Ismail Mustafa wrote:
facial recognition and rental scan
hahaha ... it was late, I was tired and the dementia had firmly set in ... :-D
:..::. Douglas H. Troy ::..
Bad Astronomy |VCF|wxWidgets|WTLI understand, it was all in good fun :) I was going to make a crack about how you must be working on the cutting edge of security, but I thought that that might be a bit overboard.
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
Missing features in VS2010: * Team Foundation is not very good at replacing source code across multiple sights. * Team Foundation should allow back-end to be other source control systems such as ClearCase * Visual Studio Static Code Analysis should support data flow analysis similar to Klocwork's Insight product. * Visual Studio Static Code Analysis for C++ should support the creation of custom tools. * Visual Studio should have built in support for source-code review, similar to Code Collaborator
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Thanks, everyone. These are very helpful. I'm taking these to Redmond next week. If you think of any more, please don't hesitate to add! jeff
And how much good do you think that's gonna do? All VS has been since 2000 is a way for them to spew "new technologies" at everyone that a) doesn't benefit the user, and b) they have no intention of supporting 100% with their dev tools. Yeah, I'm cynical...
"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 -
I understand, it was all in good fun :) I was going to make a crack about how you must be working on the cutting edge of security, but I thought that that might be a bit overboard.
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[^]?
Mustafa Ismail Mustafa wrote:
I was going to make a crack about how you must be working on the cutting edge of security, but I thought that that might be a bit overboard.
hahahaha ... that actually would have been good last night, at the time, I was look over WCF security stuffs ... Rental Scans: verifies the UHaul you're driving doesn't contain more the the alloted explosives.
:..::. Douglas H. Troy ::..
Bad Astronomy |VCF|wxWidgets|WTL -
Missing features in VS2010: * Team Foundation is not very good at replacing source code across multiple sights. * Team Foundation should allow back-end to be other source control systems such as ClearCase * Visual Studio Static Code Analysis should support data flow analysis similar to Klocwork's Insight product. * Visual Studio Static Code Analysis for C++ should support the creation of custom tools. * Visual Studio should have built in support for source-code review, similar to Code Collaborator
Related to your second bullet. Make it easy to use different source control systems in different solutions instead of making it a global setting.
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