Good. Microsoft can officially go to hell with respect to desktop development after the day I've had today dredging through a debugging job from hell.
75% of my time writing software is:
* Watching VS crash miserably. It's just seriously unreliable.
* Digging through MSDN trying to find out cryptic errors.
* Desperately trying to debug issues with various black boxes (today was 4 hours on a w3wp crash due to a CLR.dll bug related to stack usage resulting in an interesting session with EDITBIN).
* Dredging through hotfix lists trying to find out which one solved a problem.
* Sitting on the phone for HOURS to MS support who barely speak a work of English these days and don't give a shit - they just want you to fuck off so they can close the case. This is usually because two products won't talk to each other (IE and ClickOnce for example).
* WAITING LITERALLY FUCKING HOURS for things to compile and rebuild.
* Endless fucking updates that take several minutes to apply, sometimes an hour plus. I WANT TO USE MY FUCKING COMPUTER.
Not much:
* solving problems of my own.
Sorry for the rant but that's why it's really dead.
Good riddance.
It's all a "me too" as google and apple have app stores.
I think the problem is with the software you are developing rather then the IDE. If it is taking you hours to compile, there is something very wrong. I recently worked on a couple of 1 mill+ loc projects made up of more than 100 projects in a solution, which compiled in a few minutes.
For what it's worth, I found VS2010 to be so slow and prone to crashing that I reverted to 2008. Since installing the VS2011 beta, though, I haven't looked back. It's been great.
I work on C++ desktop apps, though, and they aren't huge. Your mileage may vary.
Indeed I'm trolling so bad because I've only clocked approximately 18000 hours of using it in real life since the first beta drop of VS.Net 2002 to 22:15 this evening...
Yes that's really three zeroes rounded down heavily (8 hours a day, 23 days a month, 12 months a year for 10 years)...
Being that there was never a VS.Net 2002...It was merely Visual Studio.NET
But I digress.
Even if I assume honesty from you, what does it say about you that you would use a tool for 18K hours and then berate it in such a way because you had a bad day today? I have been using VS in its various forms since 1995 and while it can be buggy and can crash - it is still a venerable tool. I use XCode, MonoDevlop, RubyMine and Eclipse as well and they all have problems. Claiming VS is 'seriously unreliable' basically makes people ignore everything you say after that because millions of people know better. Crash yes, on occasion...unreliable is different.
It is referred to as VS.Net 2002 after VS.Net 2003 came out with .Net 1.1 if you want to be pendantic.
If you really want to be pedantic, Visual Studio .Net 7.0.
It's not just today - it's been 10 years of hell. Unfortunately it pays the bills (just about).
It's not venerable tool. It's like sitting in front of a pressing machine that pokes you in the eye once an hour, but not quite enough to do you serious damage.
It could be related to what he's working on and the tool chain he's using. If you venture out of the box, you can have a very different VS experience. I use C# + nothing else, so everything is very stable for me (occasionally I encounter bugs).
Really, Eclipse is the same way (if you don't add any extra plugins, it works very very well!).
75% of my time writing software is:
* Watching VS crash miserably. It's just seriously unreliable.
* Digging through MSDN trying to find out cryptic errors.
* Desperately trying to debug issues with various black boxes (today was 4 hours on a w3wp crash due to a CLR.dll bug related to stack usage resulting in an interesting session with EDITBIN).
* Dredging through hotfix lists trying to find out which one solved a problem.
* Sitting on the phone for HOURS to MS support who barely speak a work of English these days and don't give a shit - they just want you to fuck off so they can close the case. This is usually because two products won't talk to each other (IE and ClickOnce for example).
* WAITING LITERALLY FUCKING HOURS for things to compile and rebuild.
* Endless fucking updates that take several minutes to apply, sometimes an hour plus. I WANT TO USE MY FUCKING COMPUTER.
Not much:
* solving problems of my own.
Sorry for the rant but that's why it's really dead.
Good riddance.
It's all a "me too" as google and apple have app stores.
Bring on the web for everything.