VS 2005 HELL!!! | The Coffeehouse

ZippyV
Fired Up

And THE most annoying thing: dissappearing toolbars when you switch focus between the solution explorer and a document.

jmsma2005
Better to light a candle than to curse the darkness

Kental wrote:

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

Try set the help system searches local only.

z33driver

Dragging this up because VS2005 is driving me insane. I am doing my development on a Dell Inspiron 9300 laptop with a 2GHz Pentium M chip, 2GB ram, and a 100GB hard drive.

It is dog slow. The solution for our primary product consists of about 40 individual projects. Some are ASP.NET web services projects, some WinForms, a lot of class library projects. Opening the solution takes forever (usually 10 minutes or more). VS2005 will go "blank" and hang the machine while it does whatever it is it is doing, it "flashes" the chrome around the VS2005 window, but is totally unresponsive. It pegs the CPU, the hard drive, etc. I can't figure out what the hell it is doing.

There's lots of other bugs too but right now I just want to figure out what I have to do to make it usable. I've been thinking about shelling out a couple grand for the fastest laptop I can find but I'm afraid I might do that and it still won't improve the performance. Is there anything I can do to fix this?

phreaks

z33driver wrote:
Dragging this up because VS2005 is driving me insane. I am doing my development on a Dell Inspiron 9300 laptop with a 2GHz Pentium M chip, 2GB ram, and a 100GB hard drive.

It is dog slow. The solution for our primary product consists of about 40 individual projects. Some are ASP.NET web services projects, some WinForms, a lot of class library projects. Opening the solution takes forever (usually 10 minutes or more). VS2005 will go "blank" and hang the machine while it does whatever it is it is doing, it "flashes" the chrome around the VS2005 window, but is totally unresponsive. It pegs the CPU, the hard drive, etc. I can't figure out what the hell it is doing.

There's lots of other bugs too but right now I just want to figure out what I have to do to make it usable. I've been thinking about shelling out a couple grand for the fastest laptop I can find but I'm afraid I might do that and it still won't improve the performance. Is there anything I can do to fix this?

Install VS.NET 2005 SP1 beta

Shiv
Life is beautiful :)

why not break the single solution into multiple solutions? that would certainly make things a lot faster. this was suggested by Scott Hanselman a few weeks back.

z33driver

We already have multiple solutions. But I see this behavior even with small solutions of only 3 or 4 projects as well. I'm reluctant to try and join that beta program without knowing for sure it will solve the problem. Does anyone know why VS2005 locks up and flashes the chrome?

phreaks

z33driver wrote:
We already have multiple solutions. But I see this behavior even with small solutions of only 3 or 4 projects as well. I'm reluctant to try and join that beta program without knowing for sure it will solve the problem. Does anyone know why VS2005 locks up and flashes the chrome?

I dunno, but I can tell you that I had similar issues, my solution has 6 projects and after installing the beta SP, it works so much better. really.

Rossj

NuTcAsE wrote:

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.

Hmm. Did *you* push to move to 2005? Did you, you know, check it out before you pushed to get the whole team on 2005? Not trying to shift the blame, but you really should try stuff and not just believe everything you read.

Having said that, only ever had minor complaints about VB.Net (semi-colons please)

ElucidWeb

VS 2005 is quit stable especially compared to 2003, I would have to say its the machines configuration. More often than so the machine build is done by a bunch of err lets say less educated IT crowd and do some odd ball stuff to it which creates a less than stable development environment.

I have spent thousands of hours in 2003 and 2005 and yes they crash occasionally. VS 2005 crashes less than 2003 thats for sure, try setting up a VPC for your dev environment and remove all of the uknowns out of the equation.

Eric

Tom Servo
W-hat?

phreaks wrote:

Install VS.NET 2005 SP1 beta

Page not found Sad

z33driver

ElucidWeb wrote:
VS 2005 is quit stable especially compared to 2003, I would have to say its the machines configuration. More often than so the machine build is done by a bunch of err lets say less educated IT crowd and do some odd ball stuff to it which creates a less than stable development environment.

I have spent thousands of hours in 2003 and 2005 and yes they crash occasionally. VS 2005 crashes less than 2003 thats for sure, try setting up a VPC for your dev environment and remove all of the uknowns out of the equation.

Eric

I am running a Dell Inspiron 9300 with the out of the box Windows Media Center 2005 install with all the Dell junk removed, and I dual boot Vista. For what it's worth, I see this behavior on many different OS's and configurations, I have Win XP X64 on my living room PC and see it on there as well. It is something with VS2005 and how it works, I'm trying to figure out what the flashing chrome is all about though, I've never seen that in another .NET app. My issue isn't so much that it "crashes", its that it locks up and does stuff for long periods of time, sometimes when typing code which is particularly frustrating.

z33driver

Just out of curiosity, what do most Mr. Softie coders use for their .NET development?

ElucidWeb

I have a work computer, a work laptop computer, a personal desktop and a personal laptop. The work computer is VS2003 SP1 1GB Pentium 4, not sure what the ghz rating is but I could look it up later when im at work. The laptop is VS 2003, 2005, 2 GB Centrino again not sure about ghz rating cause im to lazy to turn it on at the moment.

Personal computer is a dual core Athlon 64 X2 3800+ 2 GB RAM and my personal laptop is a pos dell inspiron 7500

In all honesty I rarely encounter issues with Visual Studio, I mean I have it crash almost every day with 2003 using NUnit, for some reason they dont mesh well at all times.

With 2005 there are some quirky issues, mostly its around window layouts, the toolbox seems to be a rather unstable window which can cuase it to hang for a bit if its set into slide mode. The server explorer can hang a bit also at times. Windows XP 64 is probably the most unstable OS I have ever used so I wouldnt use that for a dev environment thats for sure, also Media Center shouldnt be used as a development environment either since its aimed at home entertainment.

Just my thoughts, peace!

Eric

NuTcAsE
नमस्तॆ

Rossj wrote:

NuTcAsE wrote:
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.

Hmm. Did *you* push to move to 2005? Did you, you know, check it out before you pushed to get the whole team on 2005? Not trying to shift the blame, but you really should try stuff and not just believe everything you read.

Having said that, only ever had minor complaints about VB.Net (semi-colons please)

RossJ,

We did quite extensive research on the impact of adopting VS 2005 and .Net 2.0. While testing out VS 2005 we did not see major impacts and the performance gains we saw from using VS 2005 designers and .net 2.0 just flat out outshadowed any reservations we had. The struggle with management was for more political reasons than anything else.

That said, in our tests we primarily focused on C# projects since 90% of our projects seemed are focused on C#. Its mostly my fault that we did not do a lot of testing on VB.Net projects in VS 2005, and thats were most of our pain points are right now. Like I said in my initial post, I have no problems with C# its the VB.Net project that are just frustrating to work with at times.

Shiv wrote:

why not break the single solution into multiple solutions? that would certainly make things a lot faster. this was suggested by Scott Hanselman a few weeks back.

With all due respect, the suggestion by Scott Hanselman is not quite accurate. We have a solution with just 6 projects that takes up memory upto 1.2 GB. And for practicality purposes we can't further break down the projects into multiple solutions. After opening the solution in just 5 minutes and a couple of builts VS 2005 starts hogging memory with no end. Closing solutions is also still a HUGE pain as it takes forever to close any solution with more than 5 projects.

I'm still very happy with VS 2005 and its the best dev environment I have worked with but I hope with the SP1 the VS team solves these performance issues.

JChung2006

If you have a large multi-solution project, don't do the build within the VS2005 IDE. Use build tools like MSBuild or nAnt.

No doubt, IDE's are great developer productivity boosters and learning tools even, but I worry that programmers get too dependent on their IDE's and forget that they can do all their development, builds, and debugging without the benefit of a "Swiss army knife" IDE like Visual Studio or Eclipse.