Channel 9 Forums - Coffeehouse - VS.Net 2005 - Has VS.Net usability jumped the shark.

Coffeehouse - VS.Net 2005 - Has VS.Net usability jumped the shark.

Rossj — Fri, 10 Mar 2006 18:44:28 GMT

During my usual early evening trawl around my newsfeeds I found this post from Brendan Tompkins.

Brendan Tompkins wrote:

Now, I have all kinds of thoughts relating to this and how we’ve made things too complex in the .NET software development world, and in the world of computing in general, and how we’ve forgotten about ease of use

Other points involve

It's slow.
I can't easily find my files.
They've removed features that I used.

I've only spent a little time with 2005, as my current customer is still using 2003, but I find myself agreeing to a certain extent with his rant.

Now that VS.Net 2005 has had some time to settle in, are you happy with it? Is it an improvement over 2003 or is it just different? Is the performance acceptable, or does it reduce your productivity?

Coffeehouse - VS.Net 2005 - Has VS.Net usability jumped the shark.

PaoloM — Fri, 10 Mar 2006 19:08:00 GMT

It is a little slower, but that has to be expected from a much more complex application. However, the productivity enhancements from snippets and an application of IntelliSense at a much deeper level more than compensate for the increased startup time.

I usually customize the hell out of my toolbars, so I have basically the same layout between 2003 and 2005 and I can't find any missing commands...

Coffeehouse - VS.Net 2005 - Has VS.Net usability jumped the shark.

W3bbo — Fri, 10 Mar 2006 19:16:55 GMT

I just want to say one thing to the developers of VS2005:

Websites *ARE* projects!

When they release VS2005 SP1, I really want them to add an option to move the Website items back into the New Project dialog.

Coffeehouse - VS.Net 2005 - Has VS.Net usability jumped the shark.

PerfectPhase — Fri, 10 Mar 2006 19:25:54 GMT

W3bbo wrote:

I just want to say one thing to the developers of VS2005:

Websites *ARE* projects!

When they release VS2005 SP1, I really want them to add an option to move the Website items back into the New Project dialog.

Really hated that at first, but don't have a problem with it now I've go used to it, in fact I quite like it.

The main thing I really want is a native project type for libraries of web user controls that can be directly referenced from web sites (i.e. single fixed name assembly)

Coffeehouse - VS.Net 2005 - Has VS.Net usability jumped the shark.

W3bbo — Fri, 10 Mar 2006 21:16:01 GMT

PerfectPhase wrote:

Really hated that at first, but don't have a problem with it now I've go used to it, in fact I quite like it.

The main thing I really want is a native project type for libraries of web user controls that can be directly referenced from web sites (i.e. single fixed name assembly)

...why do you need a new project type for that?

Just create a bog-standard class-library project and add classes that inherit System.Web.UI.Control

Coffeehouse - VS.Net 2005 - Has VS.Net usability jumped the shark.

John Galt — Fri, 10 Mar 2006 22:58:49 GMT

A little slower?

Try doing a WinForms app!!! It's hideous with any good sized form!!!

Brutal betaware.

Coffeehouse - VS.Net 2005 - Has VS.Net usability jumped the shark.

Sven Groot — Sat, 11 Mar 2006 11:33:39 GMT

I most certainly like VS2005, and the fact that recently my last remaining ASP.NET 1.1 webhost upgraded to 2.0 means that finally I can stop installing two versions of VS which just costs way too much time (especially since I have VS2003 on CD so I can't walk away while installing it, and I have the upgrade so I need VS2002 CD1 at hand as well, plus I have to install .Net 1.1, VS2003, .Net 1.1 SP1, .Net 1.1 security update, VS2003 GDI+ update, MSDN documatation update, it was just very annoying).

Despite some other minor bugs, there's only one thing I don't understand and hate about VS2005, and that is regular expressions in the IDE. That's just completely, totally, utterly broken. When dealing with a multiline regex search and replace, VS2005 will yield the wrong results and quite frequently even crash completely. I don't understand how this couldn't have been caught; the only way not to notice it is to never use regexes in the IDE.

Coffeehouse - VS.Net 2005 - Has VS.Net usability jumped the shark.

blowdart — Sat, 11 Mar 2006 14:19:27 GMT

If you want to complain about speed I'd look at SQL2005 Management Studio. The conversion to managed code didn't do it any favours, and took a look of disk space with it.

Added bonus if you want to start writing CLR stored procs, you get Visual Studio installed, and no, you don't use a SQL project to write them either. Bizarrely and poorly laid out project choices.

Coffeehouse - VS.Net 2005 - Has VS.Net usability jumped the shark.

harumscarum — Sat, 11 Mar 2006 15:23:52 GMT

The slower performance is unacceptable for me. I recently worked on some phase2 work for a .net 1.1 project. While upgrading to 2.0 was discussed we could not find the value in doing so.

I do understand that vs2005 is a very complex product but for me it is just a small piece in a complete enterprise package I have to deliver. It is not worth the frustration since I can achieve the same results with vs2003 and .net 1.1.

Coffeehouse - VS.Net 2005 - Has VS.Net usability jumped the shark.

Zhou Yong — Sat, 11 Mar 2006 16:21:36 GMT

If you are unsatisfied with VS2005, then use SharpDevelop 2.0 instead:p

Sheva

Coffeehouse - VS.Net 2005 - Has VS.Net usability jumped the shark.

yman — Sat, 11 Mar 2006 16:43:55 GMT

Words cannot express how annoyed I am with VS 2005 (well they could, but they would be very vulgar and vile)

Every 10 seconds when I'm typing code, or else randomly when I choose to save the code (like one would do), it just freezes, like it is stuck in a bottle neck. It then takes around 7 seconds for control to come back.

It has got so annoying, I feel like throwing my computer out the window.

Imagine, frequently, when you are typing code, the app just freezes.

Coffeehouse - VS.Net 2005 - Has VS.Net usability jumped the shark.

yman — Sat, 11 Mar 2006 18:13:43 GMT

I was using VSS, until I found my saviour SourceGear SourceVault.
I was soo excited when I first got my copy of 2005, until I saw the disgusting problems in VS 2005.

For example, on both of my machines, when I hit the CSS dialog for websites, the form just popups and closes, almost as if they are not calling it as a model dialog. It never used to happen when I just installed it, but imagine, two machines, wtf!

Lets hope the sp1 for VS2005 will fix some of the horrible bugs present in certain parts, probably not though

edit:

I dont want to be seen that I'm trying to flame, I'm just pointing out my dissatisfaction with the VS 2005 IDE.

Coffeehouse - VS.Net 2005 - Has VS.Net usability jumped the shark.

borosen — Sat, 11 Mar 2006 18:31:13 GMT

yman wrote:

For example, on both of my machines, when I hit the CSS dialog for websites, the form just popups and closes, almost as if they are not calling it as a model dialog. It never used to happen when I just installed it, but imagine, two machines, wtf!

Are you by any chance running IE7?

If that is the case, you may want to have a look at a workaround.

Coffeehouse - VS.Net 2005 - Has VS.Net usability jumped the shark.

yman — Sat, 11 Mar 2006 18:56:08 GMT

borosen wrote:

yman wrote:For example, on both of my machines, when I hit the CSS dialog for websites, the form just popups and closes, almost as if they are not calling it as a model dialog. It never used to happen when I just installed it, but imagine, two machines, wtf!

Are you by any chance running IE7?

If that is the case, you may want to have a look at a workaround.

Thanks, it worked

This will stop me flicking over to Dreamweaver

Coffeehouse - VS.Net 2005 - Has VS.Net usability jumped the shark.

Scott Guthrie — Sat, 11 Mar 2006 20:18:08 GMT

I saw a comment earlier in the thread about wanting to have the same web project model in VS 2005 as in VS 2003 (single assembly, with a project file for definitions).

We are actually making this available via the VS 2005 Web Application Project Model option. A preview is available as a web download now at: http://webproject.scottgu.com.

A feature complete version will then be available later this month or the beginning of next month. We will also then add this to SP1 and support it going forward with VS in addition to the web-site option.

Hope this helps,

Scott

Coffeehouse - VS.Net 2005 - Has VS.Net usability jumped the shark.

rhm — Sat, 11 Mar 2006 20:33:15 GMT

yman wrote:

Words cannot express how annoyed I am with VS 2005 (well they could, but they would be very vulgar and vile)

Every 10 seconds when I'm typing code, or else randomly when I choose to save the code (like one would do), it just freezes, like it is stuck in a bottle neck. It then takes around 7 seconds for control to come back.

It has got so annoying, I feel like throwing my computer out the window.

Imagine, frequently, when you are typing code, the app just freezes.

Dude, buy some more RAM.

Coffeehouse - VS.Net 2005 - Has VS.Net usability jumped the shark.

PaoloM — Sat, 11 Mar 2006 21:06:39 GMT

rhm wrote:

yman wrote: Words cannot express how annoyed I am with VS 2005 (well they could, but they would be very vulgar and vile)

Every 10 seconds when I'm typing code, or else randomly when I choose to save the code (like one would do), it just freezes, like it is stuck in a bottle neck. It then takes around 7 seconds for control to come back.

It has got so annoying, I feel like throwing my computer out the window.

Imagine, frequently, when you are typing code, the app just freezes.

Dude, buy some more RAM.

And throw away that stupid antivirus program...

Coffeehouse - VS.Net 2005 - Has VS.Net usability jumped the shark.

yman — Sat, 11 Mar 2006 23:10:39 GMT

Dude, I have 2 gigs of ram

It doesn't seem to be a ram issue, seems like it is hitting a lock somewhere

Coffeehouse - VS.Net 2005 - Has VS.Net usability jumped the shark.

Scott Guthrie — Sun, 12 Mar 2006 00:50:26 GMT

Hi yman,

Any chance you could post more information about the pausing behavior you are seeing here? Is it with web projects, class library projects, windows projects? Also -- do you see it in source view or design-view?

One thing I have seen a few cases of is where the HTML validation engine can pause things slightly when typing/moving in big HTML documents. This seems to be disk IO bound (I only see this on my laptop -- not my desktop). Here is a blog post that shows how to disable it if that is your issue: http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2005/11/23/431350.aspx

One other change I'd recommend if you see things slowing down every now and then is to disable the "auto-recover" feature. You can turn this off from tools->options->auto-recover.

Hope this helps,

Scott

Coffeehouse - VS.Net 2005 - Has VS.Net usability jumped the shark.

Sven Groot — Sun, 12 Mar 2006 12:12:25 GMT

My favourite feature in VS2005 is that when you connect to a remote site with FP Server Extensions, it can actually remember your password. That was so annoying in VS2003 and before (all the way back to Visual InterDev, actually).

I also like the way I don't have to compile websites myself with the new ASP.NET model, and the way VS2005 handles references on websites. I use more than one computer, and more than once with VS2003 I'd end up compiling the website on the wrong computer, with the wrong version of some dependency and breaking the website for a few days until I could get at the other computer. VS2005 doesn't try to randomly pluck whatever version of an assembly happens to be on your harddrive and compile the site with that, it sticks with what you uploaded.

Coffeehouse - VS.Net 2005 - Has VS.Net usability jumped the shark.

phreaks — Sun, 12 Mar 2006 15:13:06 GMT

The new features are really nice, but since this is a usability thread, I will concentrate on that.

In my experience I have found some pretty poor behaviour.

There are episodes where VS.NET will simply crash, without any warning. Another big issue for me is with the designers.

There are times when the designers fail to load and complain about not being able to locate variable or method definitions when they are assigned within a constructor. As a workaround, I find myself having to new up instances and then assign them within InitializeComponent in order to get the designers to load.
Then I have to comment out the initialization inside the designer class when I want to run the code.

This generally occurs for me when I have some variable being assigned within a class constructor and then attempt to utilize it in a partial class.

//Example:

public partial class foo : myDesignableBaseClass {

   public foo(System.DateTime effectiveDate)
      :base()
{
      this.mEffectiveDate = effectiveDate;
}

}

public partial class foo {

   private System.DateTime mEffectiveDate;

   private void InitializeComponent(){
      //Init code here
   }

//method that accesses mEffectiveDate here

}

The above code in it's current state will cause the designer to fail to load for me 100% of the time. I am not sure if this is localized to my specific installation or if there are others experiencing this issue as well.

If I new-up mEffectiveDate in InitializeComponent, then the designer will load properly.

   private void InitializeComponent(){
      mEffectiveDate = System.DateTime.Now;
   }

Coffeehouse - VS.Net 2005 - Has VS.Net usability jumped the shark.

Frank Hileman — Sun, 12 Mar 2006 16:29:06 GMT

We have two classes in one project that are quite large, several thousand lines. I think one is 3.4K and another 3K. Both of these files are essentially uneditable in VS 2005. While I can edit them, the lag between typing and seeing the characters change is too long to be usable (sometimes seconds). Since these files must compile in a VS 2003 project as well, we cannot break them up using partial classes. For this reason alone I often have to bail out of VS 2005 and go back to VS 2003.

Other problems we suffered from:

- Undocumented breaking changes in the design-time infrastructure. While our run-time only dlls work great in 2.0, changes to the design-time libraries in VS 2005 broke many things. We worked around all these problems but it consumed a huge amount of time. We were only using public APIs and not anything weird like reflection.

- We discovered new bugs in the design-time portions of VS 2005. One serious one is in the code-dom serializer, that can cause our customers to lose their entire generated code that may have taken months to construct. So backups are essential. Microsoft has identified the problem and will eventually patch it, but better QA would have caught these types of things before the release.

- The toolbox has some serious new problems that still have not been completely figured out, but they can cause your project to load or unload extremely slowly. Anyone with this symptom should try resetting the toolbox.

Coffeehouse - VS.Net 2005 - Has VS.Net usability jumped the shark.

skewesme — Tue, 14 Mar 2006 01:29:38 GMT

The slowness seems very machine and memory dependent. While I really enjoy many of the new 2.0 features. It's the little things that are really irksome. Like creating a multi-project solution only to spend 2 hours trying to figure out how at add a second project and then to realize that the default behavior has changed and you now have to turn on an option before you can even add a second project. While there is a beta for the old-style web projects, not delivering this in the first place means that you either have to completely learn a new project style or wait for the service-pack. Not providing a direct evolutionary path (forcing a major paradigm change) makes it seem to the end-users (us developers) like it was rushed out the door. ASP.NET 2.0 feals much like a fork-lift upgrade which will cause people to delay or postpone until at least the first service pack and/or until ReShaper goes gold.

Coffeehouse - VS.Net 2005 - Has VS.Net usability jumped the shark.

William Stacey — Tue, 14 Mar 2006 04:19:23 GMT

"I want to take VSS into the backyard and stab it to death a million times over. "

LOL. Now that was funny.

Coffeehouse - VS.Net 2005 - Has VS.Net usability jumped the shark.

yman — Sun, 06 Aug 2006 20:22:34 GMT

I reinstalled VS and the problem seems to be solved.

But the problem seemed to happen in any place where you enter code into VS. It happened across all project types and over all types of text items.