VS 2005 HELL!!! | The Coffeehouse

NuTcAsE
नमस्तॆ

DISCLAIMER: Rant on Visual Studio 2005 (especially VB.Net)

I have to say I am really REALLY disappointed by Visual Studio 2005, especially the VB.Net side of things.

After a long struggle with management to move towards 2.0 and VS 2005, and citing 2005's new and improved features I finally managed to get our dev team on 2005.

Now, things run smoothly with our C# projects, but VB.Net is another issue. The IDE shuts down at least 5 - 10 times in a day and this is not just for one person but the entire dev team. I even had most of our machines upgraded thinking it might be a memory issue but that didn’t help either. The IDE just stops with that stupid Error Reporting dialog for no particular reason. Sometimes it’s while popping intelisense, opening up xml files (not large files at all), and sometimes even while building.

After almost 6 months of delay from the Microsoft one would expect that this version would at least be at par with 2003 and bugs would be kept at a minimum. While working on our C# projects we don’t see the same behavior but when working with VB.Net its worse than Eclipse!! (and i think Eclipse is one of the worse IDE's I’ve ever had the displeasure of working with).

Please VB.Net IDE team if you read this post, PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE fix these bugs. Not only are they annoying but its things like these that make us regret the decision of migrating to VS 2005. (God knows how I'm going to explain these issues to management...)

Has anyone else experienced these issues??

- Ritesh

andokai

Could this be the same issue you're experiencing?

NuTcAsE
नमस्तॆ

andokai wrote:
Could this be the same issue you're experiencing?

It seems to be the same issue. I'll try to get down the Hot Fix and apply on a couple of machines and see if that fixes it.

Thanks andokai, you've been of great help!!!

- R

W3bbo
The Master of Baiters

blatzcoder wrote:
Microsoft^®. Always in beta.

No, that's Google

AndyC

blatzcoder wrote:

You're right. I should have elaborated a bit better. In Microsoft lingo:

Shipped product = beta

Nope, that's still Google. GMail, Groups, Froogle, etc... Is anything of theirs not a beta?

littleguru
<3 Seattle

Yep. Google is always in beta, shipped or not... Just Beta. They should have named them Beta instead of google.

Mike Dimmick

I've largely moved from VS 2003 to 2005 for Compact Framework 1.0 development. I'm finding it a lot quicker and more stable, especially when debugging. That's my experience, though.

At home, C++ Smart Device projects are broken - it simply says 'create failed' on the status bar. This may be due to IE7 Beta 2 Preview though (not installed the latest version yet) since the project wizard is an HTML dialog.

John Galt

C# isn't immune. In fact the code editor is virtually useless with any good sized class file, which happens all of the time with Winforms stuff.

Yes, this is betaware and brutally slow and flaky. MS should be ashamed that they released this thing. They gotta stop listening to their paying customers like Boeing and start listening a lot more carefully to everyone else.

If this is how Vista is being developed, it's going to be a disaster.

Shark_M

I tell you the truth.

I expected VS2005 To be Rock solid for developers.

But alas, I was disappointed. Its IDE just sucks big time. It not stable and its slow as hell, and my machine is fast..

I mean what is microsoft playing at Expressionless

hosy

Yes, its slows down my machine (Dell Latitude C640 P42.4 & 1GB RAM). Especially when I open my Windows Forms project where it needs to load all the datasets inside my project.

Does anyone knows why VS2005 must load all those datasets when I open my project?

hosy

Very little software is 100% bug free when shipped. Sometimes the bugs are not yet discovered where as sometimes the deadline is too near and the bugs found are very damaging.

Anyway, as you all would have known. To wait for a software to be 99.99% bug free, that software won't be shipped forever.

As for new version of a software, have anyone seen a newer version of a software that is faster than its predessesor?

Windows XP is faster than Windows 2000 Professional... Right?

littleguru
<3 Seattle

I never had those issues. Perhaps because I'm using little of the new VS2005 features.

I never use the build-in data management stuff. I have also heard from a lot people, that they are having problems with the Datagrids and other new features of VS2005. One guy said to me that some of the exception messages are very very poorly written.

The Service Pack that is going to be released this summer should fix some of the issues (hopefully).

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

hosy wrote:
Windows XP is faster than Windows 2000 Professional... Right?

It is, actually, on quite a few computers I've used it on.

Back to the original point, though - the problem isn't with VS2005 being buggy - all software is buggy. The problem is that its level of bugginess is appropriate for a v1.0 product, not a v2.0 product. We had the same sort of things with VS2002, until VS2003 came and fixed most of the problems.
I'm guessing that the changes made in VS2005 were so widespread and fundemental, it can almost be considered a v1.0 release of a whole new product with all the expected instability.
The problem isn't with the product itself - it's still an excellent product, IMO - but with people's expectations for it as a 2.0 release.

Red5
Systems Manager Curmudgen

We are a VS2003 ASP.NET/VB.NET shop. My boss is of the mindset to upgrade to VS2005, even though we really don't need it. I will be thouroughly testing our projects in VS2005 after reading posts like this. We built our company on .NET when it was in Beta 1/2. So far, the experience has been great. Very few complications. 5 years later, and upgrade to VS2005 has many consequences if the transition is not painless.

ZippyV
Fired Up

Red5, I would tell your boss to wait at least until there is a service pack out.

t3kknokat

I'm sorry, but I have to say VS 2005 is easily *the* worst Microsoft developer product I have *ever* used in my 10+ professional years.

The worst part of IDE are the constant crashes if using visual inheritance.... LoaderException every 30 secs or so... and the only workaround is either to clean the solution or to restart the IDE.

I can put up with *some* number of bugs, but this is just too much crap in one single product, with no service pack in sight in reasonable time.

Also, the problems seem so easily reproducable I really have to wonder if Microsoft has any QA at all, or maybe they are all busy writing blogs, and rescheduling Vista.

There. I vented myself. I feel better. Now let's restart that IDE once again.

zhuo

What features of VS2005 are you guys using that are causing so much problems?

James

ZippyV
Fired Up

zhuo wrote:

What features of VS2005 are you guys using that are causing so much problems?

James

The ide and the compilers.

ZippyV
Fired Up

zhuo wrote:

What features of VS2005 are you guys using that are causing so much problems?

James

The ide and the compilers.

Kental

After reading all this, I'm going to thank heaven that I've not really had any of these problems. IDE's never crashed on me, I can view code files of 4kloc (C#) with no problems, etc.

The only problem I have is the 30 seconds it takes to start up the Help. Now that one's frustrating.

arunpv

Kental wrote:

After reading all this, I'm going to thank heaven that I've not really had any of these problems. IDE's never crashed on me, I can view code files of 4kloc (C#) with no problems, etc.

The only problem I have is the 30 seconds it takes to start up the Help. Now that one's frustrating.

IDE and Compiler is slow. Sometimes even the toolbar takes a long time show up (maybe i have lot of ActiveX components:s )

How can Microsoft release a software where the Help sucks:@

If I am in the middle of something and need help, i have to wait 30sec-1min for the help to load and later it will say unable to find locally and then i have do click on the Search tab type in the what i am looking for and see huge list to figure out what i am looking for which takes up my 10-30mins.

Currently, the only help i use - Google Groups. (the best)

MSDN Search - Sucks.....
MSN Search - Sucks....
Can someone please recommend them to use a thirdparty search software[C]

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

t3kknokat wrote:

I can put up with *some* number of bugs, but this is just too much crap in one single product, with no service pack in sight in reasonable time.

Isn't there an MQ quality-milestone release scheduled for the middle of 2006? Hopefully that will fix many of the bugs.

t3kknokat wrote:

Also, the problems seem so easily reproducable I really have to wonder if Microsoft has any QA at all, or maybe they are all busy writing blogs, and rescheduling Vista.

Damned if you do, damned if you don't. You ship early with bugs - you get slammed. You delay the launch - you get shouted at. You keep quiet on internal process - you get raised eyebrows. You open up and blog - you get yelled at again.

t3kknokat wrote:

There. I vented myself. I feel better. Now let's restart that IDE once again.

It's very strange. I've only used VS2005 a bit myself (and found some annoying bugs, but nothing too critical) but we have quite a few large-to-huge VS2005 projects running in our shop (think 2000+ screens) and while they have run into many, many bugs - none are critical as the people here on the thread have it.
Maybe VS2005 is very sensitive to some overlooked condition - compatibility with another app, hotfix or whatever - that causes it to behave horribly for some unfortunate people.

arunpv

Yggdrasil wrote:

t3kknokat wrote:
I can put up with *some* number of bugs, but this is just too much crap in one single product, with no service pack in sight in reasonable time.

Isn't there an MQ quality-milestone release scheduled for the middle of 2006? Hopefully that will fix many of the bugs.

t3kknokat wrote:
Also, the problems seem so easily reproducable I really have to wonder if Microsoft has any QA at all, or maybe they are all busy writing blogs, and rescheduling Vista.

Damned if you do, damned if you don't. You ship early with bugs - you get slammed. You delay the launch - you get shouted at. You keep quiet on internal process - you get raised eyebrows. You open up and blog - you get yelled at again.

t3kknokat wrote:
There. I vented myself. I feel better. Now let's restart that IDE once again.

It's very strange. I've only used VS2005 a bit myself (and found some annoying bugs, but nothing too critical) but we have quite a few large-to-huge VS2005 projects running in our shop (think 2000+ screens) and while they have run into many, many bugs - none are critical as the people here on the thread have it.
Maybe VS2005 is very sensitive to some overlooked condition - compatibility with another app, hotfix or whatever - that causes it to behave horribly for some unfortunate people.

Correct, lot of bugs but not critical but still its infuriating to wait and wait for the Help to show and tell you "unable to find" , when a company releases a product they should test every condition or atleast the with hotfixes and some compatibility. I use DevExpress and native .NET components and still its slow and you can say its the third party tools causing, ok. Tell me about the Help?

I feel VS2003 was faster than VS2005. I still believe Windows 2000 Pro is faster than WinXP and Vista will be lot slower than 2000/XP.

NuTcAsE
नमस्तॆ

Update: I tried the hot fix that andoki mentioned, it seems to work and fix the problems of having the VB.Net IDE crash unexpectedly. But now we are seing some performance problems in the IDE after applying this fix.

I havn't rolled it out to all our dev machines yet, but we did apply the fix to 5 machines and have it tested before applying to every machine. After two days of testing, the IDE becomes sluggish after regular use, takes minutes to open a 60 KB xml file and compiles slowly. Again this is VB.Net only.

I should mention though, performance problems are still better than the IDE shutting down when you dont want it to... but I'm gonna hold back on applying the fix to all the dev machines. Anyone know if / when there would be SP for VS 2005 addressing these issues?

Thanks all

- R

ZippyV
Fired Up

I found a bug too: I'm creating a css file and every time I click on the 'Build Style' button on the toolbar, the 'build styles' dialog flashes away immediately.