VS.NET quirks and rants

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From: Nathan Mates (nathan_at_visi.com)
Date: 10/14/04

  • Next message: Grant Schenck: "How to get DirectSound SDK samples to work when app not foreground" 
    Date: 14 Oct 2004 18:15:03 GMT

    In article <bmsj7oh22b8s$.qds40eg4ot4h.dlg@40tude.net>,
    The March Hare [MVP] <phil@ndsm.maps> wrote:
    >> I poked around and figured that was what the issue was. I was going
    >> to load VS 7 but your solution sounds like a better route.

    >I finally made the switch to VS7.1 when 9.0c was released. There was a
    >little adjustment but overall I'm happy with it.

       I like the compiler in VS.NET. The UI is a horrible step
    backwards. The automatic pop-to-foreground whenever the mouse cursor
    strays into a VS.NET window when focus-follows-mouse is on is BLOODY
    ANNOYING. Losing keyboard shortcuts like Alt-F7 to open project
    properties is just sloppy, especially if you have a "compatible" set
    of shortcuts-- I can add it manually, but I shouldn't have to do that.
    At least in VS.NET2003 they turned off the auto-exploding tree view in
    the Solution Explorer, but that was just plain stupid. Renaming
    workspaces to 'solutions' is a sign of things being driven by
    marketing, not engineers-- don't call it a solution if I still have to
    do all the work. VS.NET is pretty crash-happy -- 2003 less so, but
    VS6 was *rock solid* for me. You can believe I submit crash logs to
    MS every time it dies, but are there any free patches? Hah.

       Other longstanding issues never got fixed. The list of solution
    configurations doesn't have a proportional scrollbar (how about some
    consistency). The 'find in files' dialog box tries *way too much* to
    try and be helpful and figure out what you want to search for, but in
    my experience usually guess wrong. When I want to repeat a search
    (e.g. in a different set of directories), I usually have to correct
    the search. The list of directories under find in files isn't 'most
    recently used on top' but is reverse order of things being added with
    no good way to edit that.

       I could go on for a while on things (Visual SourceSafe is a really
    long rant). While I like the compiler of VS.NET, I'd prefer to just
    keep the UI of VS6. That was 10x cleaner, 1000x more stable. VS5 had
    the same focus-follows-mouse issues, so it seems that whomever had a
    clue on VS6's UI design has sadly left the building.

    Nathan Mates 

    --
<*> Nathan Mates - personal webpage http://www.visi.com/~nathan/  
# Programmer at Pandemic Studios -- http://www.pandemicstudios.com/
# NOT speaking for Pandemic Studios. "Care not what the neighbors
# think. What are the facts, and to how many decimal places?" -R.A. Heinlein
  • Next message: Grant Schenck: "How to get DirectSound SDK samples to work when app not foreground"

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