Note: This post started as a comment on the post just below, but it developed into a full blown rant along the way. I'm detailing many of my frustrations with the tools.

Scott Bellware has posted Mort or Elvis? A Question for a Bygone Era, which is a great post (as usual), but it also hit many of the pain points that I feel in working with VS 2005 recently. In fact, Scott does a great job of expressing those pain points than I could.

In the comments he talks about Microsoft's tools and then subtle product placement that I didn't recognize but drive me constantly crazy. I use VS.Net 2005 for the simple reason that it is the only one out there for .Net 2.0 development. ReSharper makes the job bearable, but it says quite a bit if I need an alpha quality tool just to feel good again.

Beyond VS.Net, my most common tools are not Microsoft ones (NAnt, NUnit, TestDriven.Net, etc). Scott comments on this:

Finally, there is this sentiment that I agree with wholeheartedly:

I wanted this for a long time. I hope that once they release ReSharper, they will rev up the work on .Net IDE. I know that I would buy Intelli.Net IDEA in a heart beat, and push it out as far as I can.

And now to my own ranting:

And my own note about the personas. They don't work anymore. I get questions from VB.Net developers that want to know how to use Rhino Mocks, there have been questions about VB.Net development with Castle, etc.(Not to go down on VB.Net programmers, but this is the language that is portrayed as Mort's favoriate). I has to do some UI work right now, and I tried hard to do this with VS.Net's Automatic UI & Coffee System(TM), but I couldn't make it do what I wanted, and I ended up doing most of it manually.

Simple UI should be the part where the tooling is excellent, but in order to use them, you need to know quite a bit about the tools, and that is not something that I see as highly productive. I know the WinForms (and Win32) API well enough to produce a working UI for most of everything, but I don't see investing time in learning the exact incantations that I need to do this or that (nothing highly complicated, by the way) for non standard scenario (binding Business Objects to a form).

By concentrating so hard on the tools, only the supposedly core scnerios are taken care of, leaving everyone that does something different high & dry. And the problem seems to be that there isn't any improvement along the way in the tools.

We have the Web Application Project, to get back the stuff they took away from VS 2003, but that is about it. Where is the promised Service Pack for Visual Studio 2005? I haven't even heard a whisper about it since it was announced, and it is not like there aren't bugs that need fixing in there.

Posts like this one, talking about how features are planned for VS, just scares me. It looks very much like the merit of a feature is its demo-ability. This produce software that demos great, but that just doesn't stand on its own when you need to develop a real scenario. Combine the non-tirivial time that you need to invest to learn how to work with the tool with the even more significant time to learn how to by-pass the tool, and you get a net loss situation. Non-demoable features end up being more important in the long run.

How many demos has seen the demo about File.ReadAllText() method? Yet it ends up saving me 5 lines of code every time that I need to read a file. Or the GC improvements? Or ASP.Net Build Providers? Linq will be cool if I could get a compiler support and intellisense alone. No need to build any UI on it, it is cool because of what it is, not because of what kind of UI I can show in a keynote.

I really like the framework, from ASP.Net to WinForms to Theards to ADO.Net. I just dislike the tool that I have to interact with it. It is nice and shiny from the outside, but don't take a too close look at the support beams. The IDE shouldn't try to help me. I know what I'm doing, thank you very much. I want to be able to work with code in my IDE, intelligence on the part of the IDE is required, otherwise I can just work in Notepad. I don't want to work like Microsoft thinks I should (TDD or DataBinding, for instance), I want to have the functionality in the class library, and the IDE should support it.

I get a far better value from TestDriven.Net than I do from VS' Test Tools, and TestDriven.Net has a far more primitive interface, with far less functionality, probably. But this is a zero friction tool, I don't need to adhere to Jamie's design philosophy if I want to use it.

Okay, that is enough ranting for now, I think