I don’t usually Rant, but this post has been welling up inside of me for a number of months now, and today it just had to come out. I’m sitting here very disappointed with the current state of things in the .NET world, particularly in relation to Visual Studio 2005. Now, I have all kinds of thoughts relating to this and how we’ve made things too complex in the .NET software development world, and in the world of computing in general, and how we’ve forgotten about ease of use, and why other technologies such as Ruby on Rails that embrace simplicity are going to be chosen in the long run if we don’t do something about all this, but this is just a rant about Visual Studio.
Understand that I’m using VS 2005 pretty much out of the box, and there may be ways to hack and configure all this stuff so that it suits my needs. Also understand that I realize that scores of people have put lots of time into this tool, and that there are many good things about it, but overall I’m finding that my life as a software developer has become much more difficult since the advent of VS 2005. Here’s a few reasons why:
1) They've messed up the support for Typed Datasets. First of all, the DataTable adapter seems pretty unless for any real CRUD operations. It works okay for filling a dataset, but I couldn’t figure out how to get it to update properly a DataSet with related tables, making it for me fairly unless. Now every time I create a Typed Dataset, there’s a bunch of stuff I have to rip out.. Ugh.
And haven’t they broken some pretty serious design rules by coupling a DTO like a dataset to the CRUD operations anyhow? I think this is really where the “RAD KILLS” message from some of our bloggers hits close to home. VS is basically BY DEFAULT trying to get me to create crappy, hard to maintain code, tightly coupled code.
2) It’s so slooooww. As others have pointed out, some of the refactoring support is so slow that it’s almost unusable. But even when tabbing between code files, there’s a noticeable pause while VS thinks about switching to your new file. This can really slow you down when you’re paging between lots of code files, which you have to do to work with a good layered application. <sarc>Perhaps this wasn’t a big issue for MS, considering your entire application should be developed in one big RAD file.</sarc>
3) It’s hard to find code files I’m working on. As I work, I have a terrible time finding files I have open. I used to just tab over until I found my file. Now, once you reach a certain # of open tabs, they get pushed off of the tabs into the drop-down list.. I can’t tell you how many times I loose track of a file during the day and have to hunt for it. Again, since you’re supposed to do all your work in one big file, I guess this wasn’t supposed to ever be an issue. How many RAD files would someone ever have open anyhow, 2? 3 at the most?
4) They’ve removed support for SQL 2000 Database Diagrams. It’s there for SQL 2005, but for SQL 2000 Databases, it’s just gone! Hey, um.. This was a feature I used, like, um A LOT! And uh, SQL Server 2005 is like NEW, and my company probably won’t be migrating for a while.
So, the other day, I fired up VS 2003 because I had to do some db diagramming (see complaint #4 above). As the trusty app launched I was filled with sadness that it’s gone. ReSharper popped up, and I smiled remembering the days where I could quickly re-factor, navigate to related code files, clean up code, create unit tests, and fire them off in NUnit with ease. This feeling quickly passed, and today I’m back to VS 2005, forcing myself to use the complex built in unit testing tool, stripping crappy autogen code, waiting for files to load, and wishing ReSharper would swoop in to save the day….
Uggh.
Technorati Tags: VS.2005, Visual Studio, ReSharper