A world apart from the everday ...

i suppose in hindsight i shouldn't complain ... afterall "they" have given us some pretty niffty new icons.

i mean what more could i ask for?

They must lick me where I lactate! I seriously don't even want to think about actually *using* VS2005 since it would make me vomit blood in large quantities. I wish someone would create a quality IDE.

One word : BETA
Another one : Feedback

http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/productfeedback/default.aspx

Use it, don't use it.

yeah i know it is still beta. however; some of the issues we have in VS2003 today were found and fedback to MS in the initial beta of VS.NET. yet they still made it through 3 proper releases and are with us today ...

already posted this to the feedback site;
in fact i have already posted hundreds (literally) of issues from the previous beta, dying to see if any of these have been addressed in this one.

One word: "Apathy"

That's what MS has for our problems.

I've been using it for a couple of weeks now and I must say I haven't had any serious issues. It miles better than the CTP's.

Armand;

i agree the issues are not "serious" per se. they're just annoying. it's kinda like buying a car. and in order to open the drivers door you gotta go kick the spare wheel first. not serious, just really annoying...

i agree, vs2005 does look really cool; and i am excited about some of the features ... more so the language features than the IDE though, but there are some good IDE things for us.

I have my beta2 disks on my kitchen counter, and I probably won't be installing it. The guys at work are also not exactly lining up to start playing with the "new bits".

Microsoft has shot themselves in the foot with Visual Studio. Here is why:

- the perfect dev IDE should be fast; 100% stable; easy to make addins for; do autocomplete flawlessly; never ever corrupt anything or force the user to close and reopen the IDE; work with assembly references perfectly everytime.

- In my opinion, VS.NET IDE fails on each and every one of these points.

- Service packs MUST be released at least within the first year. Forcing people to upgrade is totally unacceptable and has many people in the industry quite peeved.

- It is far better to incrementally improve things over time, instead of implying that what you are doing now is inefficient and you should wait X months until the next version in order to do things right.

- ideally, the IDE should be open source to allow for quicker improvements and derivative works

- I've brought this up many times with local and international people, but there is growing descent in the industry wrt this IDE. Even with local "leaders" and long time supporters, I hear the same gripes over and over. Some people are happy to work around issues, others not. I fall into the latter.

i cannot agree more ...

the problem is realistically; if not visual studio as an IDE then what? there is nothing else out there that compares, but does this mean we should just accept the instabilities and quirks because there is nothing else?

it's like hanging from the "short and curlies" over a smoldering pit of lava. the current situation hurts like hell and you wish it would end ... but then it sure is better than the alternatives available.

whatever happened to #Develop? that IDE had such promise, but then it seemed to fizzle out. The one major reason i don't use this is because of it's lack of debugging support.

what about Borland C# Builder?

ok here is what i commit to do ... i will obtain all the available IDE's out there for C# and post a comprehensive feature by feature shootout. then we can all make an informed decision.

it is totally unacepptable to force people to upgrade to new versions of your product to resolve the issues they have the current product.

it's like writing bugs into your code on purpose to ensure that you remain employed to fix them in a future build. oh wait ... don't we all do that anyways :-D

VS2003 is a lemon, VS2005 will be a lemon and VS 2007 will be one too... Until MS starts sorting out the old problems and stops introducing new features that cause more trouble, VS will suck. There are no decent alternatives available, and that's why MS aren't bothered with improving their IDE. They have the market, they have our balls in their hand. I don't know of many large companies that use Borland C# Builder or Sharpdevelop. I think C# Builder rocks, but buying it is expensive and we can't write an entire multi-tiered application with the demo to see if it fucks out too.

Like Ryan says, the issues in VS aren't ALL major. They are ALL annoying though. I've had a few MAJOR issues with the IDE and I have workarounds for them, but you can ask my co-workers how much I swear on a daily basis because of this.

We have the guys coming out from Corp for Devdays and I think Ruari is arranging a session with the community. Attend (either Devdays and/or the event) and make your feelings known

And did some quick research. This is by design - I can repro on my machine. There is a total limit of around 151 chars for the full path to the .sln file. The reason they do this is due to the windows max_path size limitations. They take into account that you will need a bin dir etc plus you might create some extra personal directories. Shorten the name of your path (or do not create a dir) and you should be ok

That being the case, I would have preferred the use of 'VS' or something as a folder name instead of 'Visual Studio 2005' wasting 16 precious characters :-p

Just finished installing the BETA2 IDE, so will reserve further judgement on it until I have played with it more.

I live in hope.

Ahmed;

thanks very much for your comments. much appreciate dude! i understand the point of why it's been done, well maybe ... it's odd that the default used causes a problem ;)

must say my further testing has been much better than my first click ...

I an old DOS 8.3 kind of guy, but there are times when I use LFNs, though I would never do this for project files.

There are times when accepting the default installation paths are fine but many time this is not the case.

I deal with so any developers who just install without thinking about the ‘USE CASE’.

This is not VS screaming but the OS. Each LFN creates multiple directory entries because of file system size limits.

I rarely put anything in \Documents and Settings and certainly not development projects.

Remember that D&S is a personalization features for multiple users if the OS and to prevent other users of the same machine from stepping on your stuff.

Stop using the default directories for projects, Create the structure you like, not the ones that come out of the box.

Do not get me wrong, there are allot of products that I allow to install to their default locations, but I never put projects or even samples there.

My normal process is to create a Data, Project and Research and Samples folder on a different drive or partition and place stuff that I create there. I Never, Ever accept default project locations, well maybe a few time I did, but they were short paths.

The IDE’s of today can only default to the most common place to create projects or no where at all (forcing you to make the decision of where to store your files and project anyways.)

Purely from a disaster recovery perspective data, projects and other stuff you create should NEVER be on the same drive as the OS, unless absolutely necessary (though I cannot not think of one).

Depending on your installation habits and/or how well you take care of your system the C: drive is usually always the first to physically fail or become corrupt. Say by..by to your files/projects.

Placing these on a separate drive (though it too can encounter problems --- Oh did I forget to say backup), protects you for C: drive brain freezes.

The moral of the story, use a system with 2 FHDs (USB external are my preference) (C: OS, other software and tools and D: for everything else), think out of the box, even during an installation process.

Think of it this way, does your corporate server store user fails on the same drive and the OS. 99.9% of the time the answer if NO. Your files are usually on some SAN storage server or at least a separate drive array.

As for the car metaphors, accepting the defaults, when you start your car, you do not need to depress the accelerator (the default), but you do if you want to go anywhere.

Ah!, longing for the old days when 8.3 was the only option is no longer the reality. LFNs are here to stay BUT no body is forcing you to use them.