Pegasus3d.com

[Jay]

So I finally got around to installing Visual Studio 2005 on my laptop. I haven't spent a huge amount of time with it yet (about three hours) so I reserve the right to modify these observations as I get more accustomed to the environment.

The short of it: I'm a bit so so on the upgrade. There is a lot of COOL stuff that the 2.0 version of the framework brings to the table and I like getting my hands on those features. ASP.NET 2.0 has some great stuff in it as well according to my reading. However I also expected the software to get a bit slimmer this time around, my older projects to transition to the 2005 environment pretty nicely and for things to work at least as well as in 2003. It is in these areas that I find myself feeling disappointed.

The first (and only project) thing I've done is try to transition my website into the 2005 environment. Upon loading my original project - I am presented with an upgrade wizard. It goes through, modifies most of my source files automatically and that is that. After this process I am dismayed to find out that my project doesn't compile. But hey this wasn't entirely unexpected. After pulling out my hair for half and hour trying to figure out the issue, I finally realize that one of my usercontrols had not been converted to new ASP.NET 2.0 way of doing things. Apparently the upgrade wizard skipped this control.

So since I've read up on it, I went ahead and change my code behind class into a partial class, changed the CodeBehind attribute on the ascx file to CodeFile and made a few other tweaks. That seemed to get the compile going.

One of the biggest bitches my coworkers and I have when it comes to Visual Studio 2003 is its obscene memory usage. We were all hoping 2005 would improve upon this issue. Boy we couldn't have been more wrong. When I open my website in VS 2003 (hosted on IIS locally) it uses about 40 megs of memory even with a number of files open but sitting idle. When I open my website in VS 2005 (hosted on IIS locally) it uses between 95 and 105 megs of memory with no files open.

WHAT.
THE.
HELL.

This is a single project solution. I can only imagine what memory usage will ballon to at work with our 25+ project solutions for various projects that we are working on. Of course memory is cheap. And if that was only issue I had - it wouldn't be THAT big of a deal. Afterall people somehow manage to work with pieces of bloat crap like Eclipse all day soooo..... no biggie right?

For those of you in the know - you know that ASP.NET projects can now be opened in two different ways. You can open and edit an ASP.NET project that sits directly on a webserver (local or remote) using the Frontpage Extensions (just like in 2003) or if you open the website directly from the filesystem, ASP.NET will use it's own built web server for testing and development so you no longer HAVE TO have IIS installed.

Well thats a great feature but for the initial conversion I decided to just stay with the IIS configuration I already had. For the most part this worked just fine until I started saving my changes in the IDE. 3 out of 4 times files would save instantaniously. However 1 out of 4 times I would have to sit idle for 5 minutes will the IDE dicked around with itself and displayed the animated saving icon in the toolbar.

I could count the number of times I had this problem in vs2003 on a single hand. It was a rare occurence. However in vs2005 it happens all the time with the same install on the same machine. Nothing has changed except vs2005. And sitting idle for five minutes after 25% of your saves for a compulsive saver such as myself isn't too appealing.

Last but not least - I've noticed that the tasks portion of the IDE in vs2005 not only classifies fatal compiler errors as errors - but it classifies HTML validation errors as errors. What does this mean and why is it bad? If I compile some web app and it fails to compile because of a single line of code and I happen to either a) have some badly formed HTML or b) some sort of inline code generating the HTML that the parser can't possibly comprehend outside of runtime that may not look like it could validate then mixed into my error list will be these validation errors. Because these issues are classified as errors - it makes the situation seem worse than it is. It also keeps me from being able to quickly fix the one issue that actually keeps the application from compiling**

I don't mind them displaying validation errors. In fact I think it's REALLY nice. I just wished they wouldn't come across as compiler errors when they are actually NOTHING of the sort.

The good news is that Microsoft is actually aware of the problems present in the release and has already committed to putting out a service release. Can't help but to skeptical though given that no such release was ever made for vs2003 despite the bugs that it had.

Here's hoping MS fixes these issues and makes me want to actually install vs2005 in a production dev environment. Because at this point, it just isn't happening.

** Note: My pages generally validate okay in vs2005 but I had a few hacks I used here and there that it didnt like.

[FondueDaredevil]

So ... any sexy GUI pictures or is it pretty straight-forward?
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Supervillains for Linux!

[Mord]

I'm wondering if the IDE running its own web server is a good thing. You're bound to run into a situation where the code works fine on the dev box but be damned if it'll work on the production server.
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[Jay]

[MasterOfTheHat]

My question is: can you friggin debug a web page on a remote install of IIS? That's what I hate about 2k3. I've got my personal "web-page-in-progress" sitting on the same server as my current web page, (since I don't have the luxury of a seperate dev server ), and I dev it on my WS. That all works fine, other than having to connect to the project using the frontpage extensions, but I can't debug the friggin code that way!

Yes, I know I could load IIS locally and run the dev page locally or I could load VS.NET on the web server, but that would either require IIS and MSDE on my WS or VS.NET on the server. I just hate having to do cross-function crap like that on a box.
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For my fellow OSYers - You know you're addicted to programming when:"The people you respect most you have never physically seen or spoken to, but you always bow to their knowledge."

*Quantum physics texts are an excellent source of 100% of the recommended daily alowance of "WTF!?!" - HitScan

support.microsoft's cause for a 0x0000007f STOP error:
"• Your computer has hardware or software problems. "

[HitScan]

[Mord]

[HitScan]

[Mord]

[Harbinger]

[Jay]

Sigh....

The worst part about all this. Microsoft will finally release the first Service Pack for VS2003 next year. Isn't that a bit too much like fixing the barn door after the cows have come home? Though its good to see that I'm not the only one a bit annoyed by what was obviously the rushed release of VS2005. I suppose though Microsoft decided that a rushed release would've cost less than all the money it would've cost to rebrand the product as "Visual Studio 2006".....