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Developer Community Unhappy with Visual Studio 2005

Another sleepless night, so I’ve been catching up on the hundreds of unread RSS items in my feed reader.

I am prefacing this post with “I haven’t done any heavy lifting with Visual Studio 2005 at this point”, so the opinions expressed herein aren’t mine.  But if the unhappiness expressed by the MS developer community at this point holds any water, it’s definitely a sad day as (in the past at least) MS’s developer tools have usually been considered leaps and bounds beyond most others.

Mini-Microsoft has some pretty good posts about the community dissatisfaction going on about the Visual Studio 2005 RTM.  He (assuming it’s a he…who knows who it really is) quotes some pretty hard hitting .Net community members in his posts; I’ll do my best to summarize what’s going on over at his blog:

By summarize I meant I’ll link to the gripers.  The real gems are in the comments of the above posts, and are very much worth reading.  I haven’t seen complaints against VS like these since the early days of the VS2002/.Net 1.0 betas…much less a 2.0 shipped/RTM product.  I was hard pressed to find any issues with VS2003…IMO it was one of the most polished products that MS has ever released…so why the (apparent) step backwards with VS2005?  That all being said, I haven’t seen too many complaints about .Net 2.0 itself, just the VS IDE.  Definitely makes me a bit wary though.  What have you guys seen thus far?

I’m also temporarily retracting my previous statements about the new SQL2005 management tools…after some further exploration I’ve noticed that the new GUI takes quite a few clicks to get anything done.  Manually typing commands in T-SQL might be quicker at this point.  Slick looking GUI, but usability leaves a bit to be desired.  This comment from Channel9 sums up what I’ve seen thus far quite nicely:

“Management Studio is just so bad that it makes Enterprise Manager look good. To one of my staff that saw me struggling with Management Studio "Well, looks like I won't be downgrading to SQL Server 2005 any time soon!"  You can't use Query builder without about 10 steps, it doesn't allow execution (even though the right click menu item is there) directly, so you have to click ok, execute it on the stupid text screen and then edit it again in the design mode by selecting all fo the text, right clicking on it and opening the designer again, the thing comes up in the most anoying fashion in the first place and doesn't have a list of your registered servers displayed by default.

I.e. the Query Analyser team wrote this thing and the Enterprise Manager team got left out in the cold. End result, is that we have the same mantality that produced the steaming pile that is Query Analyser in the Management Studio tool and thus it's almost completely unusuable because of the increased clicks (on average I have to click about 7x more than I did with Enterprise Manager to get anything done).”

From what I’ve seen so far, my thoughts exactly.  *Sigh*, this was supposed to be an incredible time to be an MS developer.  I’ll stick with what works for now.


Posted Nov 08 2005, 04:14 AM by Jayson Knight
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5 Comments

Sara wrote re: Developer Community Unhappy with Visual Studio 2005
on 11-08-2005 2:41 PM
I haven't upgraded yet, but I do intend to soon. Probably within the next month. From what I've heard so far, people are more impressed with the new SqlServer proucts than VS. I will have to try it out myself to see.
Jayson Knight wrote re: Developer Community Unhappy with Visual Studio 2005
on 11-10-2005 6:45 AM
Overall I'm pretty happy with it...I've had a few IDE hangs, but nothing showstopping for me. I think what has most people up in arms is that the build number didn't change from the RC to the RTM, which means they made NO bugfixes. Basically, they rushed it out the door to coincide with SQL2k5 and BizTalk2k6...the bugs these guys are seeing are pretty unnacceptable.
Scott Nonnenberg wrote re: Developer Community Unhappy with Visual Studio 2005
on 11-11-2005 6:02 AM
Hey Guys. First of all, full disclosure: I'm a Program Manager on the C# team. I was just passing through, and I felt the need to respond to Jayson's comment about the build number. If you go to Help->About in VS2005, the version number 8.0.50727.42 on the left side. The RC version number was 8.0.50727.26. I can vouch for the fact that we fixed bugs between those versions - I was in the room when the bugs were approved! We are certainly listening - please don't hesitate to talk to us when you run into an issue with VS2005. You can email me from my blog or go to MSDN Product Feedback center - we'll work with you to track down the issue and address it. Hopefully your experience is a good one - but remember that we're here to help when it isn't. Tnanks, Scott Nonnenberg Program Manager Visual C# Team
Brendan wrote re: Developer Community Unhappy with Visual Studio 2005
on 11-14-2005 5:23 PM
I haven't seen VS 2005 yet, but what I've read is very disappointing. If you didn't have any problems with VS 2003 then you're very lucky. I was constantly plagued with false compilation errors and pretty much had to rebuild every time I changed anything. Often that wasn't enough and I'd have to shut down the IDE, delete all object files and restart before I could compile successfully. Sometimes the IDE would just shut down while rebuilding too. Maybe the difference is in the language (I'm predominantly a VB.NET programmer) or maybe it's the fact that most of my development was for WinForms, but whatever the reason I was stunned that a service pack was never released. I hunted around for information about these errors and found out that I was not alone. They occurred for everyone in my office. We all had different machines and we'd installed each machine ourselves, so it's not as if we'd cloned the same problematic setup. I was really looking forward to moving to 2005. Most of these errors do seem IDE based. I might look around for a different IDE and see if this is any better.
Pete wrote re: Developer Community Unhappy with Visual Studio 2005
on 01-12-2006 3:44 PM
In the first few days with VS2005, I've about reached my wit's end. Numerous crashes / lockups (including a complete OS freeze), and generally daft behaviour, coupled with an incredibly slow IDE. Incidentally - if you run PerfMon with the CLR Locks&Threads counters, you'll note oodles of deadlocks within VS :)

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