A little over six months ago, Visual Studio was release. At the time of the release, there was a big ruckus about the quality of the release. Shortly before the release, there were quite a few bugs that were closed with Won’t Fix, and many people run into issues with it that were time consuming at best.

Because of all the problems, a service pack was promised in the first half of the year. At the moment, the information I could find suggests September as the due date. This is worrying since beyond Web Application Projects, there hasn’t been anything out from Microsoft to fix many of the issues that came up, and I don’t believe that they are going for a short beta cycle with this.

Six months after release, I got a different view of the product than I had at release time, so here is my current thinking in the matter.

The Good:

• It looks much slicker than VS 2003.
• Debugger visualizes & hovering over and object and getting its values is a killer feature.
• I love class diagrams. For someone who talks about code like I do, class diagrams are an excellent tool .

No, this is not a mistake. Those are the good things that I see in VS 2005 over 2003. Keep in mind that I am talking about the IDE, not the framework.

The Bad:

• It is slow. Opening the toolbox take half a minute or more, opening the server explorer is something that require a coffee break. Working with the code can be very frustrating as well, sometimes I can see the code repainting.
• It is a memory hog. I often sees it soaring quickly over 250Mb after a few minutes of use in a big project. This means that I literally can’t use two instances of it at the same time unless I’m on a 2Gb machine. This is really annoying, since it means that I can’t use it for quickly spiking some stuff.
• It hung, often. I think that today I killed VS over fifteen time, and it is not abnormally high (although it is high). I usually have to kill it two or three times a day on a 1Gb machine (much less on my 2Gb machine). Trying to use source control integration just kills it. But just opening a large project and using the IDE for a few hours can do it just as well.
• The New Item Dialog has very strange ideas about keyboard shortcuts. This dialog has a very strange ideas about what starts with an A, for instance. I want to add a new App.Config file to a project, I can’t just tap ‘A’ a couple of times until it reach the app.config icon. It just ignores some of the items in the dialog, some of the time.
• The edit & continue nonsense. I want to edit my code at debug time, it should allow me to do so than display a useless dialog box asking me what I want to do. If I’m using Web Application Projects, it just doesn’t let me edit the file, and only God knows why.

I’m not even going to try to dig deep into each of those issues, with scenarios where this caused me to lose time and work. This is a high level overview of the problems, and I wish that I could say that it was a problem in my machine.

I once stole several hours on a 64bit, 32Gb, 4 way machine to do some development on, and I can’t say that I found the experience much different than using on in a much less powered machine.

I also see the same problems at client sites. I am often told “Let it finish thinking”, and I see people alt tabbing between applications while VS does something that locks the IDE.

I am not used to having to wait for the computer, nor do I intend to get use to it.

It has been six months, enough time to learn the quirks of the IDE, and maybe work around them. I still don’t see VS 2005 as a satisfying IDE, although it is the best there is for .Net right now (which isn’t saying much actually, there are only 2 IDEs for .Net that I know of, and the other one is an open source effort that doesn’t have nearly enough resources).

What is you experience?