I’ve pounded on Visual Studio 2005 a lot this month. Overall, I’ve been happy with the IDE, and find myself more productive.
Stability: Good
Frans has been able to crash the IDE with a brace and with a mouse click. I’m happy I have not found any major problems. I did have a spectacular crash one afternoon with the old “Unexpected error encountered. It is recommended that you restart the application as soon as possible” message (HRESULT: 0x80131527 File: vsee\internal\vscomptr.inl Line: 473). Restarting was not an option as the message kept coming back. I had to kill the IDE, but didn’t lose any work.
One area I’ve found to be extremely delicate is the scripting engine integration. I have a few macros I use with Visual Studio. One of the macros uses the clipboard API. I’ve seen the macro crash vsmsvr.exe with a call to GetClipboard on several occasions. When vsmsvr.exe crashes unexpectedly, I can never get devenv.exe to accept input focus, and have to kill the IDE. The Windows clipboard seems fragile when I have both a remote desktop and virtual PC running.
Performance: Fair
Performance can drag at times. Refactoring operations on large projects are slow. My devenv.exe process has been hovering around 250MB of VM. Source control operations can also be slow. View pending check-ins can take forever when it needs to scan thousands of files, and simple add and delete operations often seem to hang the IDE for a few seconds at times.
Comments
I have many problems with performance on my laptop.
Source control operations are so slow that I can hardly believe it and the refactoring tools are all but unusable.
I might add that I work on a dual core 3 GHz, so hardware should not be a problem. VS 2003 flies on the same machine.
I'm amazed at how quickly it builds. Using the web editor functionality is strangely quite slow some times, but it doesn't mangle my markup - so i'm FINE with how it works.
Macros, however, are seriously fragile. You can easily use the macro recorder to record macros that VS2005 simply can't play back. (Like record a macro of opening a file from the solution explorer - then try to play it back... barf). Feedback that I've gotten from MS indicates that they changed a few things around between beta2 and RTM, and it would therefore look like somethings obviously got broken.
Overall though... I'd much rather use it than VS.NET.
You're very kind - or maybe a 3ghz machine and 1gig of ram just isn't enough these days. I've got 15 projects in a solution. 14 of them libs, and 1 aspnet site.
Refactoring is unusable (resharper 2 please hurry).
Build times are ok for everything but the site, which is just a complete pain when you want to make fast development changes.
I would far prefer to use the old 2003 IDE. The only thing I really wanted was standards compliant xhtml output and masterpages. I'm seriously starting to wonder about an alternative. Maybe time to go back to Vim or notepad :)
Actually, thinking more about it, the only problem seems to be the aspnet_compiler performance. Its just tarnishing my whole viewpoint.
Grrr :)
Informative blog btw.
In terms of refactoring performance, one tip I posted a few weeks back that I recommend looking at is here: weblogs.asp.net/.../434355.aspx
Hope this helps,
Scott
www.lazycoder.com/...
Oh come off it!! The core of the application is a glorified text editor, and yet it can't keep up with my normal typing speed, which by legal secretary standards isn't really that fast, and which I find extremely offputting. *And* which therefore causes me to make a great deal more typing errors that take longer to fix them because there's a delay before they appear on the screen. This is on a 3 GHz P4 HT with 2 GB of RAM and 2 160 GB hard drives. What exactly do you want me to run this on for goodness sake?!?
Now I admit, this *could* be down to Resharper 2 as well, but I don't think so: it's a very similar situation on my colleague's computer.
Now, undoubtedly some of this is down to Resharper 2.0, but I've disabled the feature in Resharper that *really* slows it down to the point of complete unusability (the code colouring), so it works OK, or at least doesn't appreciably slow VS any more than it already is.
But even if you disable the Resharper add-in completely, it's still slow. What bothers me about this? *I'm* *just* *typing*!!! And you know what actually writing code (as opposed to design work etc) is mainly about?!? *Just* *typing*. And do you know what I spending a good 60% of my time at work doing at the moment with Visual Studio? Yep, *just* *typing*.
I'm living in hope that MS are going to release a service pack that addresses this issue, but to be honest it's such a complicated product I'm not sure I'm being realistic (as frustrating as that is). :-S
Overall I like the new version but it's just got some serious performance issues that ultimately make it worse to use than VS.NET 2003. My computer just drags ever since I installed it, and I hear the sound of my hard drive thrashing way more often now. I hope the upcoming service pack fixes things, otherwise I'm really starting to consider alternatives to Visual Studio.
At times during compliation, the studio buries itself in sand for minutes and wakes up after like 8 to 10 minutes. Dont know what it is doing meanwhile. The process is not consuming any CPU at this point.
I made the recomendation to go with visual studio 2005 product, now I am regretting