VS 2005 - Love It, Despite Issues

The new Visual Studio is a much feature-improved version over its predecessors. The integrated debugger improvements are worth the upgrade just by themselves, though it is the new language features that I like the most.

However, I’m already looking forward to the hotfix that is supposed to come out next year. A number of people have blogged about bugs they have found (most, if not all, are relatively minor). I’m also hoping they slip in some performance enhancements, especially in the realm of the visual designers.

I’ve only ran into two issues personally, and I can see why these were never really found. At work we’re still developing for the 1.1 runtime. Though I’ve heard you can still target that runtime with the new studio, we have yet to officially convert our project files. We have a release that is going out soon, so I rolled back my project files from CVS and tried to open everything up and run it in VS 2003.

Nope. I was getting an internal compiler. That’s one of those that you get not when you’re code is necessarily buggy, but because the compiler is barfing on some text file or something. Ultimately I had to delete all the old .pdb (debug) files and that fixed that. So then it compiled.

But then I tried to run it. Nope. Somehow my 2005 breakpoints were still hanging around somewhere, and VS 2003 kept throwing exceptions because it could read some unknown type of breakpoint. Odd.

I solved it by checking out the code again from CVS in a different directory. Of course, I can see why this kindof stuff wasn’t caught in testing. After all, most people won’t be rolling back project files and such. But, it was still annoying.