Visual Studio 2008: First Impression
First of a quick note about comments. You probably didn’t notice but they are all gone! I got hammered with a spam bot and had 800+ comments. WordPress doesn’t do too well with that many comments. So I took to phpMyAdmin to get rid of them by hand. And well, I kinda screwed that up 
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Now on to the good stuff. I got my hands on VS2008 and installed it a few months ago at a MS conference. But I just didn’t really have a need or use for it just yet. Sure it supported .NET 2.0 and everything VS2005 did but I’m just too comfortable with VS2005.
However, I’ve gotten the oppurtunity to finally use VS2008 in a pretty much every day scenario. I’ve been given the task to give an older (see: PHP4/MySQL) program a huge facelift from the ground up. After a bit of discussion it was decided that we would use all the latest technology that we could. (Unfortunatly I didn’t choose Linq [no time to learn]).
After using VS2008 I’m actually not all that impressed. I mean sure, it has some ‘pretty’ improvements and some stuff is now slicker than it was before. But for the most part it’s a big slow dead horse (compared to VS2005)! Now I can’t say for sure if it’s just a problem with my computer or perhaps the size of my projects. But the fact remains that my solution with 14 projects is unresponsive (read: can’t work) for at least half the day! So below is my list of things that bug me in VS2008. Continue with a grain of salt as some/all problems might be do to user error, computer, etc.
- Freezes for minutes at a time after building ONE project w/ no dependencies to build
- The debugging seems awfully slow to me lately. It’s probably only a .5 sec delay, but come on.
- [Web application only?] You can only change cs files while you are at a breakpoint.
- Forces you to stop debugging when you save the web.config. I much prefer making changes to anything in the web project and refreshing the page. I realize it’s going to rebuild but it’s annoying to have to navigate to a certain place while testing.
- Leave orphaned web dev icons in the task tray! Not a problem, just bugs me.
- Ctrl+Tab is painfully slow. That and why the hell do you need pictures of code to know where to go? I’m sure this is great for 90% of Vista users that drool over the fancy vista colors. But I prefer old skool Windows 2000 theme of things (What? It’s purty!…And fast).
- The new design view. It’s slow and it still can’t handle included css or themes. It does handle master pages slightly better. But it’s so slow it’s not worth it to bother.
Well that about sums up with what has bugged me thus far after a couple of weeks of use. I’d be happy to hear from you guys if you have similar problems or if not. (I’ll try to allow comments again) I have a suspicion that it has to do with using a Web application as opposed to a web project.
* 11/17/08 Edit: Ok…it’s not that bad…I kind of like it now:)