Fairly recently, my job has had me doing more and more Windows-oriented work (C/C++).  I'm no big fan of Windows, but whatever, it's the platform this project is on.  Furthermore, I'm not much of an IDE guy, I prefer doing most of my work with Textpad and a command prompt.  Regardless, I've used Visual Studio before, and it has in my experience been the only IDE that was not terrible*.  And by not terrible, I mean it lets me write, compile, and debug my programs while being stable, fast, and not taking up 500 megs of runtime memory (*cough*Eclipse*cough*).

Oh, how things have changed between VS6 and VS2005.  Visual Studio 2005 (nee 8.0) has a habit of crashing.  Often.  For any reason.  For no reason.  Because you looked at it funny.  It crashes so often that it has a built in feature to restart VS when it crashes, which to me seems to be the developers just admitting defeat.  Now, it's embarrassing enough (not to mention absurd) to have crashes in a development and debugging tool (because, you see, if you're developing a development tool, one would hope... well, you get the picture).

But that's not why I'm writing.  I'm also not writing about how terribly buggy the syntax highlighting is, especially when it comes to active versus inactive preprocessor blocks.  Or how useless the search feature is.  Or how it sometimes misses changes in header files and you have to clean and rebuild all to actually have them included.  Or the fact that it crashes if you close the tabs too fast.  I'm writing because of one special feature.  That is, and you know you all love this one: when you double-click on an error message in the output window, it takes you to the line that contains the error.  Very handy, I'm sure you would all agree.  This feature has a slight bug, however.  If you double-click on a linking error (which has no associated line), the behavior is yet another crash.  This is repeatable, 100% of the time.  VS2005 has been out for about 2 years now.  I have the latest service packs installed.  This bug is trivially reproducible, and, unless the code is such a WTF that it is beyond my imagination, a very easy fix.  And yet it still occurs.  How can they not have fixed this?  Please, someone explain it to me.

 

* You haven't seen a truly terrible IDE until you've tried Texas Instruments' Code Composer Studio.  Now there's a WTF of staggering proportions.

**  Or Forte, which, being written in Java, ran your test programs as a thread.  This had the nice effect that if your own threads had some issues (deadlocks, infinite loops, wild thread spawning, et cetera), you had to kill the IDE.

I think I speak for everyone (or at least for myself) when I say that you have the best avatar picture on the entire internet.

joe_bruin:

* You haven't seen a truly terrible IDE until you've tried Texas Instruments' Code Composer Studio.  Now there's a WTF of staggering proportions.

Been there, done that, fixed a bug in the TMS320F2407 C library startup code without even learning the assembly language.  And I'm the hardware guy...

Funny, VS2005 has always worked for me. The only glitch I notice is when I open the help viewer, and it has to load up the catalog for the entire MSDN library. (I think I can forgive it, just this once.)

Other than that, the only crashes I've ever noticed while using VS2005 were while debugging... and in my applications. Then again, I mostly write C# code. Maybe it behaves differently with C++...?

while (numDrinks < 3) {
    haveADrink();
}
gotoWork();
while (numDrinks < 6) {
    haveADrink();
}
wasteMyTimeAndOthersOnTDWTF();

I'm with you on Visual Studio.  I also found VS6 to be a pretty solid development platform, at least once I upgraded to Windows 2000.  Though I have not sunk good money after bad buying VS.Net 2005, I did acquire .Net 2002 Pro [Academic Edition] and my experiences with that glitzy POS disincline me to further enmesh myself in M$ development tools.  The porting tools left well-worked out programs in a limbo of incompatibility.  The tutorials provided in the MSDN Help system simply did not work without major tweaking.  [I refer here to step-by-step tutorials]  The bundled MS Desktop Engine did not mesh with the IUSR_%MACHNE_NAME% object.  [I had to load the SQL 7 that came with VS6 Enterprise to get DB connectivity]  All in all, the .Net tools proved to be a bundle of WTFs.

I did not, though encounter the specific bug you refer to, but that is probably just because I abandoned .Net for more productive pursuits:  PHP/MySQL, and Programmers File Editor as my code editor.  The latter may be missing some of the fancy integration features of a full-scaled IDE, but it was free of the entanglements.

 

 

 

I have been considering to switch from Vb.Net to C#, but one of the main reasons to stay in VB is that the syntax higlighting actually works quite well in VB. I am very happy to see typing and programming errors realtime. In C# it sucks, you have to rebuild to see if something is wrong in your code. Well, that's how things have usually been in the past, but I like the way how Visual Studio does syntax check realtime in the background, it just makes things more fluent. I wonder why it works well only in VB?

sirhegel:

I have been considering to switch from Vb.Net to C#, but one of the main reasons to stay in VB is that the syntax higlighting actually works quite well in VB. I am very happy to see typing and programming errors realtime. In C# it sucks, you have to rebuild to see if something is wrong in your code. Well, that's how things have usually been in the past, but I like the way how Visual Studio does syntax check realtime in the background, it just makes things more fluent. I wonder why it works well only in VB?

 

Probably because VB has been doing it forever, or at least since 1998. 

Never had problems with it, it has a lot of nice features such as XML documentation and stuff. And the class designer, although it is a bit lame they stole it from BlueJ. But they sat around the table and shook hands afterwards.

When it did crash, it is usually attributable to me as an intern getting the most crappy old workstations all the time. Or not at all, Editing C# in notepad FTW!!

I guess there are other good IDE's (Eclipse, IntelliJ). However, Java interfaces tend to be very slow!! Argh!! Zend anyone? Only solution seems to be switching the Theme of XP to Classic. But Zend is crap compared to VS2005.

I am not sure however how the DataSet Designer works with other Databases than MS SQL.

Otherwise it is one of the better IDE's I have worked with. And when it crashes, or your system, Project Recovery is a breeze! A real relief to start up again afterwards and read "Your computer crashed, however we have fixed the project up for ya, no problemo."

I also like this feature, until the compiler crashes... When it does, every time the code changes the compiler is run... and crashes... Note that the compiler crashes, not VB. The only solution is to restart VB (I'm using the Express Edition) and when you do so, it closes each file, and each file causes the compiler to be run (WhyTF?) and to crash. Well, that scenario happened to me when I tried to put a custom control (not a UserControl, a ContainerControl - I think) on a form inside the same project. Fortunately, there was a patch and it worked.

Now we have stability.

rjnewton:

Probably because VB has been doing it forever, or at least since 1998. 

Make that 1988 (or even earlier - I know that QB 4.0 already had this feature).

sirhegel:

I wonder why it works well only in VB?

C# has had equally good intellisense as VB for a very long time. I don't recall ever having to rebuild the application to find errors in my code with C#, though the earliest IDE used for that would have been VS 2003 Professional (and I used VS 2002 for VB). 2005 is ace. :-)

All I have to say is: a failure occurred while attempting to start the compilation

Too bad that microsoft closes 99% of the reported bugs as "not reproducible", and considers that to be the end of it.

 VS2005 has caught up with and surpassed Eclipse for memory hoggage, crashing, instability, F-ed up behaviors, inconsistency and slowness. The only way MS will fix anything is if you, the dev, take time out of your schedule to do their work for them, tracking down exact 100% reproducible scenarios that they can then verify. They do next to nothing to validate submitted bugs.

ON top of that, we were practically stalked by our contact person there. All we ever got from her was "here's a hotfix to try, apply it immediately and let me know how it works. We're on a tight schedule here". Excuse me lady, WE'RE on a tight schedule HERE, and your POS IDE is making it TIGHTER. 

 I too have the latest patches and service packs for VS2005. They've fixed trivial issues, but some major problems are still there, and they've introduced more.

But .NET 3.0 and ORCAS is almost out! Why not write a new version before you fix the old one. Good Idea. 

 Favorite current IDE issue:

Compile freezes in the middle.Can't STOP it, no response from IDE.Can't CLOSE the IDE because you have a compile in process. Wheeeee!

 

 

 

tster:

I think I speak for everyone (or at least for myself) when I say that you have the best avatar picture on the entire internet.

 That logo is only the start... take a look at The "Works on My Machine" Certification program
 

Ah, Visual Studio 6, how I loved you.  It's a shame what an aberration you became with the next release.  They took away InterDev!  Plus, it crashed all the time when compiling with lots of resources.  In one of my software engineering courses in college, I had to work on an application designed by previous classes (which could inspire a week's worth of WTFs) that had a massive image file included in the resources -- something like 20MB.  I couldn't convince the rest of the team to remove it from the executable because the file had to be there to work.  Anyway, any time you messed with any of the resources, VC++ would crash.  You'd have to recompile four or five times before it would finish successfully.  God I hated that thing.

And don't even get me started on Eclipse!  Try having Eclipse, Firefox 2, and a 60 MB PDF in Acrobat all open at once.  My machine had 2GB of memory and still came to a grinding hault if I didn't kill them all off and restart them every day when I came in and after lunch.  Maybe two years ago I tried the Eclipse GUI designer when I was working in Java.  That thing was so slow I actually preferred to write the Swing code by hand.  And I had thought nothing was worse than Swing code.

 The only reason to use an IDE is for intellisense and integrated debugging.  Intellisense is just a sign that your language is too frigging big and unpredictable (I'm looking at you, Java).  Integrated debugging is nice, but it's not worth the overhead.  Give me a text editor with syntax highlighting and customizable indentation rules, and I'm set.

No crashes in VS2005 for me. I write in C#, C++ and VB.Net (when I absolutely have to).

 

Have you considered that you may have faulty hardware? 

make sure you have sp1 installed for vs2005, it may help:

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/bb265237.aspx 

I used it every day and I don't think I've had it crash on me yet.  C#, VB.NET, ASP.NET, even smart device applications.  I think it's a very good IDE. 

joe_bruin:

I have the latest service packs installed.

 

Jeff S:

make sure you have sp1 installed for vs2005

Congratulations, you can't read. 

VS2005 is unstable when the language is VB.  I've seen the compiler crashes as one of the other posters have noticed and it is annoying.  It rarely crashes when I'm using C#.

The only non-VB crash I've ever seen is with databinding, specifically when you've bound a control to a custom class and then renamed the class later.  After that, when you tried to databind another control you'd either get the Object not set to an instance error or a hard crash.  The fix is to delete the renamed datasource object from under the project items.  I think SP1 fixed the crash bug as I only see the error message now.

Other than that, I'm pleased with VS2005.  It could be better with memory, but I've got plenty to spare.

 

sirhegel:

I have been considering to switch from Vb.Net to C#, but one of the main reasons to stay in VB is that the syntax higlighting actually works quite well in VB. I am very happy to see typing and programming errors realtime. In C# it sucks, you have to rebuild to see if something is wrong in your code. Well, that's how things have usually been in the past, but I like the way how Visual Studio does syntax check realtime in the background, it just makes things more fluent. I wonder why it works well only in VB?

That's one of the worst reasons to pick a language I've ever heard.  There are good reasons to pick VB (namely, knocking out a simple windows UI-heavy app in no time), but "It has good syntax highlighting"?  If your editor doesn't have good syntax highlighting for a language, you pick a new editor, not a new language.

 

Visual Studio 2002 was a WTF in and of itself.

On the C++ side, one of my friend told me that whatever version (2003, 2005) is terrible regarding syntax highlighting and code completion. I don't know about C#, but on the VB side of things it is, as far as I can tell, quite good (meaning it works, and when something is not highlighted correctly, it's a pretty strong indication of an error in your code).

I can imagine parsing C++ is quite a bit more complicated than parsing VB or C# though (pre-processor, templates...), although I'm sure there are IDEs out there that actually manage to do that much better.

On the minus side, it sometimes crawls with a big solution (updates to the highlighting can take forever) and is a real hog on resources when debugging. Sometimes the compiler will just give up and crash, and syntax highlighting will be dead. That does not happen to me near enough to be a nuisance, though.

asuffield:

joe_bruin:

I have the latest service packs installed.

 

Jeff S:

make sure you have sp1 installed for vs2005

Congratulations, you can't read. 

Well, all things considered, I'd rather be someone who is guilty of quickly skimming a forum post and missing a point while trying to be helpful, rather than someone who is apparently is incapable of drawing accurate or logical conclusions (I can't read?) from situations.  But that's just me.

I would have to disagree. I use VS.Net 2005 daily and have yet to have a problem with it crashing. In fact I don't recall ever having it crash on me. Maybe, like stated before, it behaves differently with C++/C/VC++, but with VB.Net and C# I honestly have yet to have the IDE crash on me. JMHO

ender:

rjnewton:

Probably because VB has been doing it forever, or at least since 1998. 

Make that 1988 (or even earlier - I know that QB 4.0 already had this feature).

I remember BASIC language syntax errors being pointed out as you entered them on a Sinclair ZX81 at the beginning of the 1980's. Admittedly, the message was always "SYNTAX ERROR - REDO FROM START" and the line being entered was then discarded, but either way ...

Martin:

I remember BASIC language syntax errors being pointed out as you entered them on a Sinclair ZX81 at the beginning of the 1980's. Admittedly, the message was always "SYNTAX ERROR - REDO FROM START" and the line being entered was then discarded, but either way ...

The editor in QB 4.0 behaved identically to the editor in VB 6.0 (haven't used VB.net) - by default it'd immediately hilight the line and point out the error (and it would force all keywords to upper-case, and variable/sub/function names to the case they were declared with).
Oh, and wasn't the basic on ZX81 from Microsoft?