Visual Studio.NET 2005: We will sell no wine -- before its time?

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Recently we got a frustrated post from somebody on our eggheadcafe.com forums to the effect that "VS2005 is a Piece of Garbage and is bug Ridden" -- rant, rant..

After I got over the initial amusement, I went back to the MS C# newsgroup and noticed the same guy was stirring it up over there too. In fact, a few people did chime in about their own problems. And, to be fair, at least a couple more chimed in with their happiness and warm fuzzy success stories.

I mean, look. Everybody agrees this was an extremely ambitious release. And lots of people accused Microsoft of pushing it out the door too soon; these complaints started way before RTM.

This particular developer was attempting to preserve work he had done in 2003 with SqlDataAdapter by bringing it onto the Component Designer from the Toolbox (its not even in the default list, they want you to use the new SqlDataSource - which is actually quite cool). So he had a legitimate beef, although I think it's really kind of overkill to say that the whole product sucks on the basis of a rather narrow and inflexible project framework version conversion demand.

But at this point, I have to agree that they did rush it out. It's a wonderful piece of work, but It has BUGS man! I mean, Visual Studio 2003 has been out for three years and we will only see the first Service Pack next year! I put one in LadyBug back in August, they said it would be fixed by RTM and it's not. I had to reopen the item and remind them, and I still haven't seen any response.

Have you ever gotten the disappearing IDE bug? I've had it happen a couple of times. You're working on something and you start to type an opening brace or something and -- POOF! It takes off at Warp 9 and man that whole sucker is just GONE!

It's like it was never there! No trace of it ever having been loaded! Scary, man!

It reminds me of that old wine commercial with Orson Welles "We will sell no wine . . . before its time." I bet he never drank an ounce of that rotgut.


Would that it were true though . . .

Peter has been active on the C# and other MS newsgroups, has had samples at gotdotnet.com (now codegallery.com) that have been downloaded over 56,000 times, and has written numerous articles for eggheadcafe.com, for which he is a co-founder, and MSDNAA sites. He has also been a technical reviewer on books from Prentice Hall, Manning and other publishers. Peter was a Microsoft MVP for 10 years. Peter was born and raised in New York City, and after a stint as a jazz musician playing contrabass with the Robert Hunt Trio, migrated to sunny Florida, where he was hired as a rookie Financial Consultant at Merrill Lynch in Orlando, specializing in Corporate Services. It was at Merrill that Peter realized computers and technology were his forte. He spent his last few years at Merrill developing real – time computerized trading and and stock charting program using advanced technical analysis indicators, some of which are his own inventions. In 1997, he moved on to architect and serve as lead developer on a number of innovative web-based and middleware solutions for the healthcare and financial services industry.

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