Visual Studio 2005 (professional) is really bad. I’ve been bitten by LNK1104 error real bad. The linker cannot update the executable since its locked - by Visual Studio! I have to restart Visual Studio every time I want to build the application.
I tried to install the service pack (which btw, doesn’t indicate in advance the huge amount of disk space it requires during installation) and that managed to crash. It did its unroll thingmajiggy. Now Visual Studio simply fails to run :(. Uninstall/Reinstall doesn’t work. I’m having the OS reinstalled now.
Other irritating things I’ve experienced (I’ve seen others report these too):
VS keeps creating “Visual Studio 2005” folders in the solution and project directories.
VS Configuration Manager is just unintuitive and buggy.
I like the C++ compiler in VS 2005 - it produces pretty good code but all these other things have made me lose most of my love for VS 2005.
.net was(is) great, finally a framework where you could do almost everything on the windows platform, good runtime performance, good language support, etc… Coming from vb6, java and c++ it was so good just to have everything around you; it almost felt like you came home.
All the new generation .net stuff don’t impress me, if you are not 100% Microsoft evangelist, going to Microsoft seminars, reading Microsoft blogs, taking Microsoft courses, etc… it can be quite an effort to catch up. And when I finally have the time to test some new feature like, it doesn’t work because I am not running vista or some other obscure reason.
I wish that Microsoft would improve instead of expand…
I develop on all three platforms. By far the hardest to setup for development is Windows. Linux is apt-get install kdevelop, OSX is download and install XCode. Windows took the better part of a day to prepare, including hunting down some obscure hot-fix patch so I could compile against Qt 4.3.
I went on a job interview several years ago at a reputable company with a large development staff. I told them I did not use VS at all, and that I just compiled everything from the command line. The Development director said, “you can do that?” I did not get an offer. He probably thought I was “the guy in the room”. Which may be true.
But I can’t believe people go through this gymkhana with VS. MS has done a very good job convincing intelligent people to buy products they probably don’t need. Plus, if you really like IDEs (I don’t), there are several good alternatives available; for instance #develop (LGPL) is pretty good:
It is a testament to MS’s short-sightedness that VS is still not free (of charge). They should be doing everything they can to keep people developing for their platforms.
I see your point but I think your example isn’t typical. At least not for me. You don’t need all the “team” stuff to get Visual Studio running. You certainly don’t need all the database stuff either. The complexity comes when you start installing all the extra stuff that aren’t part of Visual Studio.
In fact, all the extra software you included in your list aren’t part of the Visual Studio product. You have to pay extra for them.
I just (reinstall) Visual Studio 2005 on my new laptop a few weeks ago.
When all was said and done, installing the base system (only Professional, not Team System), MSDN documentation, SP1, windows updates, 4-5 addins and 4-5 libraries/tools (like NDoc, FxCop, etc), it took me 5 hours.
That’s some killer 7-unit stack you’re fielding, any of them have legendary yet? =D
Bob, but VS is free, though you have to live without some of the goodies. Open Source was almost certainly the driver of that.
And yes, it is possible to slipstream all the VS updates together. (Team edition for database is a separate product still, as are team explorer and sql server obviously, so it’s down to only four long installs instead of seven.) Just combining VS with VS SP1 can cut an hour off your install time, SP1 is so ginormous.
Too bad exactly this situation persists with VS6 with no way of slipstreaming, msi not having existed then. (SP6, the SP5 processor pack, various other post-SP6 updates, debugging tools…) I’m so glad that I finally had enough transitioned that I didn’t have to install it with this latest laptop.
All these OSS folks talking about how simple and easy their stacks are need to try comparing apples to apples. The Team System includes a powerful, integrated source code control system, as well as the productivity-enhancing IDE and debugger that come with VS 2005. Standalone emacs, standalone gcc, or standalone catalyst/wxPerl on FreeBSD don’t even approach this level of functionality. It’s like comparing a car to a tricycle and complaining the car is too complex.
Don’t get me wrong; I think MS needs to streamline their install process, no question about it. VS 2005 SP 1 in particular is a total disaster. But let’s keep comparisons relevant to the example at hand and not just preach the Linux gospel.
Since your stack consists of “Team” level software, I assume this is at your workplace and not on a private machine. Shouldn’t your IT department (or the guy sitting in the basement behind the furnace who’s doing that job) have standard images for you programmer-types to install? If they don’t, take a look at:
@Matt,
OK, how about this? On my Mac, I installed Ruby, RubyGems, Rails, MySQL, Subversion and TextMate in under 2 hours. This after upgrading the OS to Tiger, which was an 1 hour of it doing its own thing, while I was programming on my desktop PC. So, here’s a source control system, integrated debugger and an IDE that the core Rails team uses. And no install hassle whatsoever. Is that more acceptable to you?
Let’s look at the brand new MacBook I just got. It comes with Eclipse, JDK, a C/C++ compiler, VI, Emacs, Scites, PHP, Python, Perl, Apache httpd, Ruby, and of course XCode.
Now, let’s look at my Linux system over here. It also comes with everything but XCode, Well, if I am not doing Java development, and I want an IDE, I’ll download something from the Internet.
Now, over to my Windows PC: It has… …uh… Notepad? Yup, that’s right, the OS with 90% of the market share comes with zero development tools. Oh wait, there’s CMD.exe Batch programming!
Why are there six different flavors of Windows Vista, and not one comes with a basic set of development tools? Why if I buy VisualStudio.NET, doesn’t that come with a version of IIS?
The irony is that the fastest way to get development tools on Windows is to download Cygwin. I simply don’t understand why Windows developers put up with this mess.
I’m not sure what the issue here is. If this is really taking up so much of Jeff “The Stiletto” Atwood’s time, he should make a ghost image, or just slipstream the service packs into the installer. I think the fact that you even can slipstream the service packs reflects well on Microsoft. Visual Studio and SQL Server aren’t exactly lightweight apps. I can’t see some apt-get type of solution working for them until we get much bigger tubes.
Bob:
SharpDevelop is impressive, but it’s no VS2005. I remember in a recent-ish version dragging a folder into itself would infinitely recurse, copying the folder into itself over and over. Hopefully they’ve fixed that up, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was still pretty crashy.
As Foxy “Foxy” Shadis pointed out, you can get a free copy of Visual Studio Express: http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/express/
Some features are limited, but it’s still better than a kick in the ass.
No, what it is, is the people who loved to configure the stack, “real developers,” complained enough to everyone who would listen about how easy Microsoft made it for newbies, so Microsoft (using piss poor judgment) decided to make theirs as the rest of the free open-source development tools.
Wow, your company’s IT department allows you to install software? They are really living on the dangerous side compared to most I’ve experienced, who don’t give users/developers sufficient permissions.
You don’t need Team Foundation Client to start coding. SQL Server Express is not part of VS so I don’t know why you even mention it. Service packs are separate installs which enable you to uninstall them on demand if they break something or do you prefer they get bolted to the software?
Some of us don’t use open source IDE’s so you should explain why you think they are better.
Visual Studio is a complex IDE. Probably the most complex one around. Installs take time. Not a big deal. Staring at the screen duting long installs is a bad use of one’s time.
I decided to install /usr/ports/java/jdk15 on my FreeBSD machine last night. After manually downloading four files (including 55MB of source code) the build stopped because I hadn’t downloaded another 52MB of some other source code (good thing I hadn’t gone to bed yet and noticed so I could get the source and start the build again).
That was at 10:00PM last night, I woke up this morning, it is still building.
And oh yeah, before I even started, I was warned that I needed 2.5GB of hard disk space to build JDK 1.5 (wtf?).
Note that I’m not even talking about Eclipse or Tomcat, just the JDK.
Compared to this fun, double-clicking to install Visual Studio and a couple of service packs is a walk in the park.
I think VS2005 is just fine and I think there heading in the right direction with VS2008. The WPF alone is an amazing feat besides all the enchancements to the Team Suite.
And for all you Linux trolls out there I think the best solution for VS developers to program cross platform apps is Mono. http://www.mono-project.com
