VS2005 - Experiences?

Hi all,

Whilst I really appreciate the technical innovations and advancements in
VS2005, I'm disappointed by several things:

Performance:
Boy is it slow. I'm running it on an XP Pro SP2 workstation, 3.2Ghz P4 with
1GB DDR RAM and it crawls. I've tried increasing available memory,
defragging regularly, but nothing speeds it up. It takes forever to refresh
a form when you switch from code to the designer, even if no code changes
have been made to any of the controls. There are occasions when the window
goes into "Not Responding" mode, the mouse frantically switches from pointer
to hourglass to crosshairs and back again (like 3x a second) and I have to
go away for a minute or so to let it get it's knickers untwisted.

Edit & Continue debugging is also unbelievably slow! I have to wait at
least 2s from right clicking on code to getting a context menu. Stepping
through line by line is a real drag, and there's a huge delay between typing
and the text actually appearing in the editor if I actually decide to change
the code. It's almost slow enough to be of no use at all. Why?

Stability:
I know I'm not the only one on here who experiences regular crashes. VS2003
wasn't perfect, but at least it wouldn't crash quite this regularly. Often
during saves, rebuilds, ending the current debug session etc it just throws
up an error and advises me to close. Sending the error report to MS is also
pointless, as the first warning it gives you is "This may take some time as
the error report contains a large amount of data". Ten minutes later over a
2Mb connection and it's still trying to send it - thanks, but I think I'll
just terminate it. I guess I'm lucky the autosave feature has always
worked, or I'd have lost a lot of work by now!

I've noticed if I'm stupid enough to leave VS.NET open overnight so that I
can return to my solution the next day, things seem significantly worse both
performance and stability wise. Could there be a time-based memory leak
here perhaps guys?


Irritating GUI "features":
Moving the buttons in the solution explorer so that "View Code" isn't where
you remember it being since 2002. Change for change's sake. The
"Auto-hide" windows like the ToolBox, Immediate Window, Properties dialog
etc which sometimes just spontaneously show up when opening a solution and
refuse to disappear until you've clicked some magical combination of giving
them the focus, then giving another tool window the focus, then clicking
their pin twice, then threatening it.

Clipboard ring seems to have disappeared - why?

Toolbars have a mind of their own, when in VS2003 I finally got them trained
to stay where they should be depending on whether I was looking at code or a
designer.

Severe bug of making all user-controls vanish from a form after a rebuild
seems to have resurfaced - it was fixed courtesy of a HotFix in VS2003, why
has it come back?

It's not obvious that you have many documents open any longer as the little
scroll buttons to move through the tabs has been replaced with a drop-down
menu showing all the documents you have open. This makes navigation harder
IMO.

I have a Microsoft IntelliMouse with the "Back" button mapped to a
double-click action - this doesn't seem to work in the IDE any longer.

CodeBehind in Windows Forms - It's a neat feature that I agree with, but why
is it so damn difficult to actually access that code when you need to? The
easiest way I've found is to right-click on the name of a control somewhere
in *my* code, say TextBox1, and Go To Definition. Can't there just be a
"Code Behind" option on the context menu when right clicking a Form in the
solution explorer?

Can we expect service packs and updates to address some of these issues
(most notably the terrible performance and stability), or will we see a
repeat of typical MS practices with this version? i.e., will we just be
told that the dev team is focussing on Orcas now so support for Whidbey will
be limited?

Regards,
Alex Clark


.