denis bider

Various thoughts

Visual Studio 2005 Configuration Manager Bugs

Posted Oct 7, 2006 at 16:32 by denisbider

Last edited Dec 8, 2007 at 04:42 by denisbider

programming

The programmer who created the Visual Studio 2005 Configuration Manager should be hung.

The Configuration Manager just doesn't work. It's so quirky you would think that they shipped it without even a minimal test. Suppose you remove a configuration; rename a different configuration to match the name of the one you removed; close the Configuration Manager; open it again; and both configurations reappear.

Heck, forget about renaming anything. Just try to remove a configuration from a project. Close the solution and open it again. The removed configuration is still there. If I want to achieve anything, I have to edit the .vcproj files manually.

Not to mention that, as you switch the active solution configuration, all of the settings sometimes just seem to flip and then you have to reset them again one by one, manually.

The Visual Studio 2005 IDE, overall, is such a crappy piece of software. It is better than Visual Studio 2003, not to mention 2002, which was impossibly buggy. But it's so way behind the stability of Visual Studio 6, which simply worked, whatever you did.

And it's not just the Configuration Manager. It's the whole IDE. Try creating a custom build step for a project. The extra dependencies don't start to work until you close the solution and reopen it. And that's not documented anywhere - it's a bug you have to learn about and work around it.

And the whole IDE is so frustratingly slow. I have a double-core 3.2GHz machine, and still I cannot write code normally while I'm compiling. Each keypress takes a few seconds to interpret. That's just an impossible degradation compared to the responsiveness of Visual Studio 6.

Whoever implemented Visual Studio 2005, they did an enormously crappy job. It seems as if Microsoft gave the job to a bunch of fresh out of college C# programmers who don't know their way around. The quality would be acceptable for a first try, but this is not the first try - it's their 3rd version of the .NET IDE, and the 8th version of Visual Studio overall. Just what on Earth are they doing?

Has everybody who worked on Visual Studio 6 packed up and gone to Bora Bora?

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Showing 9 out of 9 comments, oldest first:

Comment on Oct 7, 2006 at 18:51 by Anonymous

I thought i was the only one having hard times working with VS 2005. You already mentioned many blunders. I would just like to remark that at the same resolution i get approximately ten lines of visible code less than in VS 6 (and i've already decreased editors default font size). Working on a 15.1" notebook screen can be consecutively quite harsh. Additionally considering IDE slowness, increased necessity for mouse intervention and other bugs makes it a frustrating experience indeed.

Comment on Oct 8, 2006 at 12:21 by denisbider

Oh yes, the mouse!

Visual Studio 6 came with convenient shortcuts for everything. If you compiled and got errors, or if you did a Find in Files, you could go from the location of one error or result to the next one simply by pressing F4.

In VS 2005, I haven't found any other way than to laboriously grab the mouse, point it to error you want to be at, and double-click.

I don't experience the code visibility problem because I have a fairly big screen to begin with - a 24"; having worked with a 15" laptop screen for 3 years, I so much recommend the upgrade.

Comment on Oct 8, 2006 at 12:26 by denisbider

Not to mention that I haven't found any keyboard shortcut just to build the current project. You have to right click on the project in the solution explorer, open the "Project Only" sub-item, and click "Build". In VS6, you get the same thing by... pressing F10.

Comment on Dec 30, 2006 at 14:59 by Anonymous

Thanks for letting me know that I'm not crazy in thinking that the Configuration Manager is totally screwed up. I've wasted hours on it. My recommendation: go with Java!

Comment on Jan 1, 2007 at 19:59 by denisbider

I don't have experience with visual development environments for Java, but I hope that SP1 for VS 2005 has fixed these bugs. I've installed SP1, but I haven't yet had the chance (and courage) to play with the configuration manager to see if it works any better now... :)

Comment on Jan 11, 2008 at 17:06 by Anonymous

So the impossibility of creating a release version of a web site isn't me, it's the config manager? I've been asked to fix a project in VS 2005, and have been surprised at the number of stumbling blocks.

wish I could go back to a real IDE, Delphi...

Comment on Jan 11, 2008 at 20:01 by denisbider

I recommend installing VS 2005 Service Pack 1 if you haven't done so yet, I believe it fixes most of these bugs.

Comment on May 19, 2008 at 22:39 by Anonymous

Thanks for posting this so I know I'm not the only one pulling my hair out with the stupid configuration manager. I have a total of 12 different deployments, I can't believe something I am supposed to rely on could be this buggy! The worst part is I am using VS2008!!! they STILL haven't fixed it! (That or the fact I migrated my project from 2005 means I brought the bugs with me somehow)

Comment on Jul 2, 2008 at 12:54 by Anonymous

Also, the danm intellisense. "Updating intellisense"...In other words, it's not important what the programmer wants to do, the damn IDE knows better.