Did VS2005 Ship Too Early? | The Coffeehouse

irascian
Irascible Ian

It's still early days for me with VS2005. Initial impressions are pretty favourable although Lord it's slow even on a pretty powerful laptop - using Help is just a major pain in the backside.

However the blogs have been reporting some pretty serious problems and now Mini-Microsoft has had a bit of a rant with links to most of the blog entries here

I can't agree with the "anonymous" comment dissing him/her for reporting the problems (they're public on blogs anyway) but can't help feeling the posting is way too negative (but maybe I'm just being naive and will feel differently after launching VS2005-developed projects).

One comment I CAN agree with is how hopeless the service pack policy (or lack of!) is with regard to fixing some pretty major bugs. There's one example of a tab control property "visible" just not doing anything. Resolution? It won't be fixed to "maintain compatibility with the previous version of .Net". How lame is that?!!

What are everyone else's impressions (or is it really too early to tell?)

leighsword
LeighSword

Don't worry, all things on the schedule, VS2005, VS2006(service pack), VS2008, VS2009(service pack).......

Tom Servo
W-hat?

Is the help still getting unresponsive after a few clicks? I had that problem during past builds up until Beta 2, but it was always closed Not Reproducable.

irascian
Irascible Ian

It is here. Typically you click, nothing happens, the hard disk suddenly thrashes like mad and then eventually the help dialogue starts responding.

Actually I'm not sure it's only Help - I'll have a better idea when I've done a lot more work in the IDE. At the moment I'm just playing with it or working through book examples trying to get familiar with the changes (anybody know how to run a SQL Server script from within the IDE or is this not possible?)

Tom Servo
W-hat?

Nah, it's even worse with beta 2, you might be able to successfully click and browse two items in the index, but after that, I'm just able to witness a spinning IE icon and a stuck progress bar in the status bar, no amount of time will make it react.

And I'm not going to install the final version yet, because I need the WinFX framework to continue working on my pet projects.

Shark_M

its working fine here, no major complaints

perhaps you need to reinstall VS2005,

the only thing is that its a bit slow when your building a really huge project.... but other than that its very responsive ..... i am happy with it

maybe they will make it even better with service packs

my machine is a P4 1.7 Ghz, and 512 RAM

well it does what i need it to do Big Smile

, but i hear AMD 64 x2 are very fast, have you tried it on AMD processors?, am getting one on boxing day:)

Manip

I think I'll stick with VS2005 Beta 2 until it expires... Then dump a retail version on assuming they have fixed some of the nastier bugs by then..

Detroit Muscle
Wii!

It doesn't matter, nobody will use VS2005 for professional projects the first year it's released anyway. VS2005 is only being used by hobbiests and for evaluation purposes right now. In another year or so, MS will release patches for all the bugs and then people will start using it for serious work.

Yggdrasil
Pour me a cab, 'cause I can't drink no more.

Detroit Muscle wrote:
It doesn't matter, nobody will use VS2005 for professional projects the first year it's released anyway. VS2005 is only being used by hobbiests and for evaluation purposes right now. In another year or so, MS will release patches for all the bugs and then people will start using it for serious work.

I know of three different projects - all "serious, professional" projects, being developed on .NET 2.0. All three had a lot of urging by Microsoft to be early adopters, using technologies like VSTOv2 which aren't available for v1.1. All three started developing with Beta1, moved to Beta2 and will move to RTM soon. All three are conflicted - on one hand, they wanted - NEEDED - 2005 to be released so their project schedules won't get all out of whack. On the other hand, they've been putting up with the bugs and beta-level stability hoping that the RTM will solve all their problems. So now the RTM is out and they can release, but they're still having IDE bugs and no SP in sight. Bummer.

John Galt

As bad as Vs.net is (i.e. you can't use URL Rewritting in ASP.NET because of 3 separate bugs in it, I have managed to crash it about 20 times in the span of two hours the other day, all with different errors) SQL Server 2005 is even worse.

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).

This stuff is buggy, and it clearly shows that they didn't bother to listen to customers much. (unless of course it got a ton of votes on the feedback system like C# Edit and Continue which the implimentation is horrible (i.e. try editing a dll that a asp.net 2.0 web site depends on. You can't edit it while it's running, no way not how, even if you would agree to restarting it to see the changes. You have to stop the damn site, edit it and then start it again.)

And then there is the Winforms editor which is actually SLOWER than Vs.net 2003 which is a major accomplishment considering how horribly slow it is... Man I wish I had VB 6 back sometimes... forms showed up instantly and the thing was mostly stable (especially after the 6 service packs which we don't get anymore, we have to jump through hoops to get hotfixes because they won't even publish them publically)

All and all, this is definately a downgrade and not something that we'll be moving to any time soon. In fact, SQL Server has basically made it so that if we move off of SQL Server 2000 or they push us off because of lack of support, we'll be moving to MySQL 5.

wacko

I can't say I have run into very many issues in my uses of it. Nteam has been deving on its since B2 and other then VSTF its not been that bad at all. Aside from the help being slow I have had only one crash. all though I will say one thing that really does kinda get at me is code snippets in vb.net they are way broken.

Overall it has come along way since some of the first version we saw and to be all honest this product has really gone the paces when it came to user feedback. So in the end I think its worth an upgrade as I have not come across anything that prevents me from getting the work done I need to.

dotnetjunkie

Detroit Muscle wrote:
It doesn't matter, nobody will use VS2005 for professional projects the first year it's released anyway. VS2005 is only being used by hobbiests and for evaluation purposes right now. In another year or so, MS will release patches for all the bugs and then people will start using it for serious work.

Give me a break!
This is completely ridiculous.

Our company already uses it heavily for professional projects, and I know of several partners doing so as well.

Not to speak of the hundreds of production ASP.NET 2.0 websites that our hosting partner has deployed!

BenZilla

I'll only be using C++ express edition so I won't be stressing the system as much as you guys Cool

Rossj

My friend just contacted me to tell me that if he does

using System.Web ;

then VS has decided to just remove the ;, quite why a space implies that the ; is unnecessary I don't know. Only happens on 'using' ..

Are we likely to get any answers on how Microsoft intends to fix this mess? I'm going to the Launch even in Birmingham on Tuesday and you can bet I'll be asking some awkward questions unless there is some sort of official recognition that the product is flawed for a large number of people.

DarekMeridian
Ok now I'm pissed!

I have been playing with the MSDN Pro on my dev laptop as well as my everyday desktop. The clean install on the laptop definately is working a lot better than the desktop that had beta's and WinFx Framework.. So I suggest a clean machine install. On the desktop the IDE does work a little hoaky with random processor grabs and I tested a few bugs that I saw on different blogs around and did have the problems. Not to mention on the desktop I got some install warnings involving not having permissions to write to some registry entries.

So clean installs are definately recommended Someone suggested that no one is really using VS2005 well I can say our company is deploying it over the weekend (were closed friday), and I know of at least one mid management department at NYSE that is already building a project that they started with beta 2.. so I think that statement is not exactly accurate.

Born2Run
Why is the caption missing??

I find it very, very strange that big companies start developing business important applications using a beta product from Microsoft. You would think they would learn from the VS 2002 / VS 2003 fiasko Perplexed

This version is going to have a lot of bugs, I am sure. We will see version 2.1 of .NET in the next year, propably before Vista launches.

But I have some upcoming freelance projects which I will develop in 2.0. But then I am not a huge company depending on business applications to work 100% perfectly 100% of the time.

Steve411

Installed it a week or so ago, DAAAAAAAM....NNNN, works like a charm.

- Steve

Tommy Lee

Born2Run wrote:
I find it very, very strange that big companies start developing business important applications using a beta product from Microsoft. You would think they would learn from the VS 2002 / VS 2003 fiasko

As an evangelist who works with early adopters, I can give some insight. One of the reasons is that they want an IDE for the newer .NET Framework. Typically this is the case for ASP.NET. They find the features compelling or makes their team more productive and VS2005 is the best tool to take advantage of developing for it. The second reason is "the technology aggressor". Who are these folks? These are the folks that during our recent tech downturn, instead of hibernating and laying off IT staff, they were using IT and Dev as an asset and taking advantage of new technology to help them build applications much faster. Then of course you have folks who love new technology and are always on the early adopter track.

Tomorrow at the launch, you will hear about the customers who are early adopters (they are a fraction of the adopters) of the .NET Framework 2.0 and VS2005. You will also be able to check out the apps they built at www.microsoft.com/casestudies.

Hope this gives some insight.

BenZilla

I do know alot of game studios who are working with PC/xbox development use XNA.

Which is basically TS with an extra role for artists and other specific game development roles.

And that's based off 2005.

W3bbo
The Master of Baiters

BenZilla wrote:
Which is basically TS with an extra role for artists and other specific game development roles.

TS?

blowdart
Peek-a-boo

W3bbo wrote:
BenZilla wrote:Which is basically TS with an extra role for artists and other specific game development roles.

TS?

Team System

Charles
Welcome Change

This is a great example of the problem with placing too much importance on what a FEW bloggers have to say about a product's quality. Why don't you point to the positive feedback for a product as well? At any rate, I'll stay out of "Oh no, Microsoft does it again..." conversation and just say that I'd encourage people to make decisions of product quality by actually using the product as opposed to reading what a FEW blogger's have to say.

As always, send your specific feedback to the product teams which is as easy as making a post in the Coffeehouse with a subject pattern like: VS2005 Bug: Foo. Or, better yet, just report bugs directly to the VS team as you've been doing in the beta program.

C

irascian
Irascible Ian

Charles wrote:

This is a great example of the problem with placing too much importance on what a FEW bloggers have to say about a product's quality. Why don't you point to the positive feedback for a product as well?

Oh come on Charles, you know as well as I do there's a whole bunch of Microsoft brown-nosers out there who post blog entries raving about stuff who then admit they haven't actually used or downloaded the software they're posting a rave blog entry about. And even they constitute just a "FEW" in the grand scheme of things, at this early stage. Most of the positive feedback I've read appears to be written solely to impress their Microsoft management and help with their performance appraisal, or by MVPs with a vested interest in keeping their title - such people are hardly going to publicly say "This is buggy as hell and isn't ready for prime time yet".

Microsoft history is littered with rave "reviews" of software that cost a lot of shops a lot of time trying to get working in real environments. My first really bad encounter was the ADO Connector or Remote Data Connection or whatever it ended up being renamed after about three versions, each with a new label attached (it enabled AJAX-like implementation before even XMLHTTP was born - useful for doing things like having drop-down listbox selections retrieving ADO data to update another drop-down listbox without having to refresh the page). I got badly burnt on a project which relied on that technology and it took endless debugging and analysis and about three MDAC releases for the technology to actually deliver on all those rave reviews. Then there were the endless IIS "Object has moved click here" problems with the Proxy Server product (affectionately known as 'Poxy Server' by anyone foolish enough to believe the marketing hype for the product). Then there was ASP with its fantastic session management (oh you wanted to do session management on a web farm? Oops! That one took about a year before it got publicly acknowledged as an issue for most shops), BizTalk 2004 fiasco, ASP.NET's total lack of compliance with the legal laws of the land with regard to DDA disability laws etc etc. Enough said!

If we left it to "Positive feedback" even more of us would have got burnt with a LOT of wasted time and money than we have already done!

It doesn't matter how FEW people are publicly complaining - it's whether their complaints are real and will affect anybody taking a risk on Microsoft as part of expensive and major software deployments.

The whole point of my raising the issue here is that there are people here who I trust, who aren't just Microsoft marketeers, and who I know have been using the product in Enterprise-type environments. It's also becoming very clear that a lot of stuff is being released AFTER the planned original ASP.NET 2.0 release whether we're talking Team System, "we're going to release an updated migration tool in a few weeks" or anything else that is being posted on an almost daily basis on the blogs.

Unfortunately November 7th was a date set in stone regardless of any last-minute "regression test failures" such as the one that delayed the MSDN Universal release of the RTM version. The number of bugs being raised after beta 2 and the number of poor explanations as to why some pretty obvious ones were not going to be fixed also gave cause for alarm.

Alas there's insufficient evidence here or on the blogs to give any clear indication as to whether there really is no smoke without fire, although the feedback is more worrying than I'd expected. I thought Mini-Microsoft's comment that some comments on this thread were like Microsoft's own version of Slashdot were alarmingly close to the truth. But let's not just close our eyes and say there's only a FEW people having problems. There's only a FEW people reporting on VS2005 at all and frankly to get this level of problem reporting at this early stage is worrying to those of us wondering what the real story is.

Charles
Welcome Change

irascian,

I'm not playing the role of the corporate mouthpiece. As you mentioned, VS RTM is rather young. I would argue that it's therefore hard to justify it as being "buggy as hell". If it's really that bad, then I'd be the first to scream and yell, but it does in fact seem to me to be highly usable, stable and less buggy than 2003! But I am not an enterprise developer so I can't go there.

Please provide specific bug feedback and I will personally see to it that the owners of the buggy mechanism get your bug reports. Fair?

C

Karim
Trapped in a world he never made!

If anyone takes anecdotal data points from people who have actually used it, I built an ASP .NET 2.0 web app this summer (using the Go Live license). I specifically went with 2.0 because I didn't have a whole lot of time to develop the app, and I specifically needed to implement something very much like the role management in the ASP .NET 2.0 membership provider.

I got the app finished ahead of schedule. Because I was using the ASP .NET 2.0 login control, I could add stuff that wasn't in the requirements like allowing the app users to reset their own passwords.

The customer loved it, the users loved it, it was very reliable, performed well even over HTTPS, and it was easy to use.

I am not the world's biggest fan of ASP. But I am impressed that I was able to write this app using beta software and it turned out to be as functional and reliable as it did.