Tired, Tired, Tired of Visual Studio.NET

Yep, you heard me say it. I'm tired of VS.NET. It's full of annoying bugs, it's slow, fat, and generally annoying; but there's more to it for me, because of my history of using it.

I've used VS.NET since December 2000, when I first got my hands on beta1. Prior to that, I'd used the old Visual Studio since 1997, although it wasn't really a composite entity back then, each language had its own IDE. The tools back then were fairly stable, and MS would release regular service packs for each version. You wouldn't have to live with major bugs for long. Things weren't perfect, obviously; MTS and DLL Hell were real problems, but once you knew the rules you could bypass or ease most of the pain. Also, Visual InterDev, the ASP development environment, sucked (users of InterDev fall into two camps - those that used it because it was the only tool available for the job, and those that thought it was the greatest thing in the world & wouldn't hear anything said against it. Personally, I thought that a) the debugger was notoriously difficult to set up, usually wouldn't work, and also prevented anyone else from working while one person was debugging, and b) the only editing features it offered was to colour your server-side code yellow).

Then the company I was with at the time decided to embark on the re-engineering of their systems using .NET; we had an MS consultant in at the time reviewing our systems, and he convinced my bosses that .NET was just what we needed. He did such a good job, they decided they would grab the first public beta as soon as it was relased (the .NET Early Adopters Program, where regular non-public releases are used, was too pricey).

We were all pretty excited about it. We were going to get our mitts on the brand new technology and tools before anyone else! At the time, I was leading the internet development team for the company, and the prospect of jettisoning InterDev was great. So, I eagerly attempted to download the beta1 bits, again and again (everyone in the world was trying to download it at the same time, apparently) until finally I had gone through the painfully long install (still with us, even in beta1 of VS 2005) and was sitting in front of .NET beta1.

At first, it was cool. We all learned the new features, and started picking through the .NET framework. Then the playing had to stop. We had a project to deliver, with all the usual deadlines, meetings, problems and politics of any other project; but the one critical difference was: we were using beta development tools.

Man, that was hard. The software, as you can expect, crashed often. It chewed up your code without warning, crashed and lost your work (I was having probably about 4 - 5 crashes a day, some people had more); sometimes, when it crashed, it wouldn't reopen your solution, so you had to manually edit files using trial and error to see what had gone wrong before loading VS again. SourceSafe integration wasn't there, so we had to introduce some rules to ensure we had proper source control. On top of this, people didn't have time to learn the new technology properly; there were no training courses; the MS consultants in the UK didn't have the information (when we had questions, they had to go to the product teams in the US), and they probably learned a lot about .NET from us. Little problems would take weeks to sort out, and in the end we had to put in place hacky workarounds (for instance, there was no URLBehavior property on web references in beta1, so once you entered a URL for your web reference, which in our case was always localhost, it was "burned" into the resulting DLL, with no way to configure it on release - took us a while to realise this, i.e. we were well down the dev path with release deadlines burning us, and I had to write code to dynamically reassign the url using config.web - oh, yeah, they reversed this name to web.config with beta2...).

Beta2 brought significant changes - it was like a new product; beta1 turned out to be un-installable, so new dev builds had to be imaged, and all our machines rebuilt. Upgrading to the new beta was a major undertaking, and I had to do a lot of research into this; I took a copy of our code base and upgraded it to beta2, documenting every change I made, while development continued on the code (we had deadlines, and absolutely could not stop dev to do the upgrade). Once I had the upgrade notes, we took a weekend out to migrate the code. Beta2 brought its own bugs; it had source control integrated, but it wasn't perfect. VS continued to mangle and delete code - in particular, it would delete ASP.NET control declarations, so you'd have to manually re-enter them again (or, copy and paste them to a text file, then paste them back when it happened); we stopped using the form designer, because it would just completely mangle and destroy your page.

That's another thing, and excuse me while I digress into a sub-rant - I've been using MS products to create web pages since 1996, when FrontPage was released; this tool was notorious for reformatting your carefully prepared HTML; InterDev did it, as does VS.NET; now, finally, with the VS 2005 release we're told this is fixed. Only took 9 years!

Right, rant over. I still see VS as that bloated, slow, buggy beta app I first saw back in December 2000; I don't see much different in VS 1.x - it still contains bugs that cause me to lose code (esp. in Windows Forms); more infuriating, MS still doesn't release service packs for all those annoying bugs! When you're developing software to tight deadlines, the last thing you need is a buggy dev env.

Please let VS 2005 be the cool, fast RAD development environment we were promised back in 2000!