VS2005 Not ready for prime time

[CMM]

I am so disappointed in VS2005. The "little things" wrong with it are just
mind-boggling. Boy, I'll be so mad if I have to wait a year for the ".1"
release that fixes all the bugs in this obvious beta product.

This (received today) is just one of the many examples of why ASP.NET 2.0
was totally not ready for prime time.
http://www.kbalertz.com/Feedback_911717.aspx The "workaround" they cite
isn't a workaround AT ALL. They're actually saying... "don't use it." It's
handling of CSS classes sucks (no dropdown for style classes anywhere...
everything has to be inputted manually from memory)... it's handling of
globalization via resources sucks (Global_Resource doesn't appear in any
drop downs and neither does its keys).

It's the "little things" that matter. Not the big hammers and frameworks
(like all the code-behind and project model "improvements" in ASP.NET 2.0).
It's the little things that make you scratch your head and make you waste
hours of time trying to figure what YOU'RE doing wrong... when it's just
that the tool you're using is in need of an IMMEDIATE patch cycle.

 

[Steve C. Orr [MVP, MCSD]]

There is a case where the background color isn't displaying as configured,
so Microsoft listed another way to set the background color. That sounds
like a work around to me.
Sure VS isn't perfect, but what is? It's far better than its ever been, and
its the best all around web development tool I've used.
Intellisense is seemingly everywhere in VS2005 now - so much that it stuck
out to you when you discovered a couple spots where it still doesn't exist
yet. I applaud Microsoft's efforts to date and eagerly await future
versions that are even better.

 

[Guest]

I agree with Steve. VS 2005 is much better than previous versions as well
as any other dev tool. I notice that many would rather focus on the few
bugs, which any software has, than the vast features and improvements that
make our lives easier.

Thanks,

J

 

[CMM]

Something is always better than nothing. Right? I agree with that.

But, I'm not an apologist like a lot (all?) of you "MVP's." I love Visual
Studio and .NET in general. I wouldn't be using it if I didn't. But, I'm not
going to sit here and say that Visual Studio 2005 lives up to the HYPE... or
that I expected something a little more *polished* from a company with
Microsoft's resources and their development resources....
You say you "eagerly await future versions that are even better." Well,
unless you speak up, it'll be over a year before you do and they'll make you
pay for it.... and at the same time they'll probably force you to have to
refactor your code for good measure. Just so you can get a stupid little bug
fix that shouldn't have been there to begin with.

VS2003 was extremely well-polished. Probably because it was a "patch" of
VS2002. VS2005 REINFORCES the old Microsoft stereotype that they NEVER get
it (even close to) right the first x.0 release.

P.S. I wasn't talking about Intellisense. I was talking about the Property
Editor. The CssClass property behaves like it doesn't know your page is
linked to a Stylesheet. The Resource Name / Resource Key field in the
Expressions editor for choosing localized strings acts like you don't have a
whole stack of resource files in App_GlobalResources (I know it works better
with Page by Page resource files... but that's not a reason... that's a
flaw).

In fact the dialog box involved in the latter is actually BUG-RIDDEN. As
after you enter stuff once into it and go back, voila drop-down works as
you'd expect. Change something and try to click OK... "huh OK is disabled?
What's going on?" Spend a few minutes using the Expressions editor for
localization and you'd know what I mean.

 

[Karl Seguin [MVP]]

I've had mixed feelings about VS.NET 2005...There hasn't been anything
horrible, but I have had to adjust more than I should. I still get errors
reported that aren't errors (normally ones that I fixed a few builds back)
but that don't cause problems. I strongly disagree with the high amount of
error aspx files generate for non-build-errors (they should all be
warnings). The new project model has a lot of annoyances (thankfully we have
a beta project that's more to my liking).

As far as features, generics and anonymous functions are a big part of the
daily code i use/write. Many of the new ASP.NET features are fluff and
downright promote HORRIBLE coding practice (i wouldn't make a big deal about
it, but every tutorial out there (especially those from the ASP.NET team)
seem to make use of them).

In the end, I do think some aspect could have been better polished. My first
week in the IDE shouldn't have been as painful, but now that I'm past it,
things are running much more smoothly.

I should also note that I've been running EAPs of resharper, which only
recently started seeing quasi-stable builds.

Personally, all I'm hoping for are more frequent and easy to access
pathes/updates.

Karl

 

[CMM]

In the end, VS2005 is fantastic. But, the apologists that gush over
everything that MS does do the platform a huge disservice. MS isn't doing us
a favor by creating these tools. We pay them money for it (and some of play
A LOT of it!!! in the area of $4000 and more a year).

 

[CMM]

I agree. The CLR work done for .NET 2.0 is phenomenal.

However, the IDE and Designer (WinForm,WebForm, and even the XML
designer.... wait, we DON'T HAVE an XML designer do we?) teams were not that
awake. People gush over the new intellisense stuff and code "visualizer"
like they've never heard of a QuickWatch window or the Immediate Pane. The
TableAdapter is a fine idea... but in the hands of the of the Designer team,
it was decided this should be tightly coupled in the SAME FILE as the
Dataset albeit in a different namespace (huh????).... making
TypedDatasets+TableAdapters use over physical (as in Remoting) n-tiers
impossible (i.e. Dataset alone passed through tiers, TableAdapter only in
the middle tier). Is this 1998 again?

I too am hoping for more frequent updates rather than marketing driven and
hyped up releases (MS: "Introducing Visual Studio 2006!.... give us $3000
because it corrects everything we promised for Visual Studio 2005!")

 

[Juan T. Llibre]

re:

P.S. I wasn't talking about Intellisense. I was talking about the Property Editor. The CssClass
property behaves like it doesn't know your page is linked to a Stylesheet. The Resource Name /
Resource Key field in the Expressions editor for choosing localized strings acts like you don't
have a whole stack of resource files in App_GlobalResources

What I would suggest, CMM, is that you file your
comments at the MSDN Product Feedback Center:

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

That is the best way to try to get features you want into upcoming versions
of Visual Studio, or to get things which aren't working as well as they should, fixed.




Juan T. Llibre
ASP.NET MVP
ASPNETFAQ.COM : http://www.aspnetfaq.com
==================================

 

[CMM]

What I would suggest, CMM, is that you file your
comments at the MSDN Product Feedback Center:

I have...for one or two at least... they end up right back here as "Vote"
post. This was more of a general "gripe" post than any one suggestion. Just
had to vent.

 

[Kevin Spencer]

I have to agree with Karl. I haven't done any ASP.Net with VS.Net 2005 yet,
but I've been using it for a variety of other projects for over a year. For
everything else, it is an amazing dev environment. From what I've read in
the SDK regarding ASP.Net 2.0, and what I've read in the newsgroups and
Google about ASP.Net 2.0 and the VS.Net IDE for it, I am not exactly
chomping at the bit to dive in.

I believe Microsoft had the right idea with the change from classic ASP to
ASP.Net. It demanded more knowledge of the developer, forcing developers to
become better developers. That's good for everybody. Yes, there were some
issues with it, but simply catering to the deliberately ignorant, which it
sounds like happened with the latest incarnation, and breaking the original
programming model so drastically with so little benefit, except perhaps in
terms of accomodating the deliberately ignorant, well, I'm not so sure
whether the judgment exercised in the case of ASP.Net 2.0 was correctly
motivated.

Master Pages are a good idea, for sure. Breaking up the monolithic assembly
was a good idea, but I'm not sure I like the alternative arrived at. It
seems that both one assembly per project, and one assembly per Page are poor
solutions at opposite ends of the spectrum. And why the drastic change in
the assembly locations, extra folders, etc.?

I will adjust and adapt. That is a crucial programming skill. But I do
wonder about this particular technology. Still, as I said, in terms of
everything else Visual Studio.Net 2005 does, and everything else in the .Net
platform 2.0, Microsoft hit the ball right out of the park.

--
HTH,

Kevin Spencer
Microsoft MVP
..Net Developer
We got a sick zebra a hat,
you ultimate tuna.


"Karl Seguin [MVP]" <karl REMOVE @ REMOVE openmymind REMOVEMETOO . ANDME
net> wrote in message news:[email protected]...

 

[CMM]

Microsoft hit the ball right out of the park.

There wasn't much wrong with VS.NET to begin with. I wouldn't call 2005
homerun based on that.
I'd call it a 3-base hit... and almost entirely because of the CLR and
framework classes improvments.

re: ASP.NET, actually, after working with it for a while... creating a new
site from scratch... I actually like the new model. Though upgrading a
previous site is a bit of a hassle... and as I mentioned there are serious
head's scratchers in terms of "follow through" on the part of the ASP.NET
team. Css features are extremely lacking (downright no-frills!). As are XML
editing features (non-existent?). This is extremely confounding to me....
especially in today's day and age.



--
-C. Moya
www.cmoya.com

I have to agree with Karl. I haven't done any ASP.Net with VS.Net 2005
yet, but I've been using it for a variety of other projects for over a
year. For everything else, it is an amazing dev environment. From what I've
read in the SDK regarding ASP.Net 2.0, and what I've read in the newsgroups
and Google about ASP.Net 2.0 and the VS.Net IDE for it, I am not exactly
chomping at the bit to dive in.

I believe Microsoft had the right idea with the change from classic ASP to
ASP.Net. It demanded more knowledge of the developer, forcing developers
to become better developers. That's good for everybody. Yes, there were
some issues with it, but simply catering to the deliberately ignorant,
which it sounds like happened with the latest incarnation, and breaking
the original programming model so drastically with so little benefit,
except perhaps in terms of accomodating the deliberately ignorant, well,
I'm not so sure whether the judgment exercised in the case of ASP.Net 2.0
was correctly motivated.

Master Pages are a good idea, for sure. Breaking up the monolithic
assembly was a good idea, but I'm not sure I like the alternative arrived
at. It seems that both one assembly per project, and one assembly per Page
are poor solutions at opposite ends of the spectrum. And why the drastic
change in the assembly locations, extra folders, etc.?

I will adjust and adapt. That is a crucial programming skill. But I do
wonder about this particular technology. Still, as I said, in terms of
everything else Visual Studio.Net 2005 does, and everything else in the
.Net platform 2.0, Microsoft hit the ball right out of the park.

--
HTH,

Kevin Spencer
Microsoft MVP
.Net Developer
We got a sick zebra a hat,
you ultimate tuna.


"Karl Seguin [MVP]" <karl REMOVE @ REMOVE openmymind REMOVEMETOO . ANDME
net> wrote in message news:[email protected]...

 

[Kevin Spencer]

There wasn't much wrong with VS.NET to begin with. I wouldn't call 2005

homerun based on that.
I'd call it a 3-base hit... and almost entirely because of the CLR and
framework classes improvments.

You have to look for the stuff that is added to VS.Net 2005 to see it. None
of it is obvious or flashy. But there's tons of it there. Refactoring alone
is a huge improvement. Intellisense is improved tremendously. The "Surround
With..." command and Code Snippets are also very useful. Those are the
things that spring to mind right off the bat, but there are literally dozens
of features that maximize coding time. Take some time to read the "What's
new" articles in the SDK sometime, you may be pleasantly surprised.

Css features are extremely lacking (downright no-frills!). As are XML
editing features (non-existent?). This is extremely confounding to me....
especially in today's day and age.

I don't know what you're looking at, but you must be looking in the wrong
place. The CSS editor is excellent for working with external style sheets,
and the Intellisense comes right out of the DTD for CSS. As for XML, well,
XML can be almost anything, dozens of different "flavors." I'm not sure what
you expect the IDE to be able to do graphically with any type of XML you
might want to edit. If you just want to talk about XML as a base language,
it's got great Intellisense for editing XML code. But in addition, you
should check out the XSD tools and even more importantly, the XSL editor and
debugging tools. You can even step through an XSL document while parsing and
do watches with it. I've used the heck out of both of these.

Considering the number of XML flavors out there, I believe Microsoft honed
in on the most important ones, and supports them very well.

--
HTH,

Kevin Spencer
Microsoft MVP
..Net Developer
We got a sick zebra a hat,
you ultimate tuna.