Frans Bouma has a blog entry that talks about Microsoft's apparent postponement of SQL Server 2005 (2006?), and by extension Visual Studio 2005 (2006?).
I don't have a problem with that actually. I'd rather get it “late” and get it right than early and busted.
Speaking of “early and busted”, let's talk about Visual Studio.NET 2003. It's a wonderful product. The IDE feels like home, and with all the plug ins I've added, I'm beginning to think that I might regret Intel backing off the 4ghz Pentium 4.
However, there is one little problem - there are major bugs in VS.NET 2003, and Microsoft has done nothing to fix them. We all know (or in my case, have heard) about the mangling of HTML that the IDE does, which is very bad, but can be avoided with some care. Some of the problems that we are running into are even worse.
I'll tell you about the killer: Intellisense loses its mind. After a VB.NET project exceeds a certain (unknown) size, and you change a class that is inherited, you might find that rather than compiling normally, your the Task panel reports hundreds of errors. Most of the errors are that controls don't exist, when in fact, they are right there!
Fortunately, after much trial and error, and perusing newsgroups, we discovered that doing a full rebuild in the IDE fixes the problem. So when you change even a single character in a class, you must then do a full rebuild (wait 1 minute for compile), and *then* you can run your program... oh, but wait! Everytime you run the program, it has to do a compile (unless you want to run the .exe directly and run the risk that you might need the debugger and not have it readily available)! Another 30-45 seconds down the tube. Doesn't sound like much, but everyone out there reading who is a developer knows that taking 105 seconds to wait for your app to startup is a flow killer, especially when it happens at pseudo-random.
Shame on you Microsoft.
Worst of all, from what I can tell, this problem only happens in Visual Basic.NET, which means all my friends at the Chicago .NET group get together can blow me crap for it since I'm the only VB'er in the group (besides my friend and coworker Joe, who is a hippie freak anyway). <sigh>
Perhaps I should just create a category in this blog called “My love hate relationship with Microsoft”. Tonight, I'm feeling the hate.