I recently was unfortunate enough to have installed Visual Studio 2005 on one of my computers and attempt to use it for my primary development work. As soon as I installed it and opened one of my existing projects, it automatically deleted all project files. Luckily I had a backup which I could quickly restore and try again. It deleted all files again. Physically deleted from my hard disk. It just opened an empty project. So I thought perhaps there’s something in my project that makes it act that way. I created a new test project, added a new source file, typed ” void main(” and as soon as I wanted to type the “)”, I got a BSOD. I reset my machine, and found out that my hard disk could not be detected anymore. After 2 hours of messing around I got it to boot again to the desktop. I started Visual Studio again and it started using 200% CPU. I kid you not. Perfmon was showing me that Visual Studio was using 200% CPU time. I don’t know how this is possible. Then as I was trying to investigate a dialog showed up stating “Visual Studio 2005 is now formatting your hard disks, please wait…”. There were no “OK” or “Cancel” buttons. Just a progress indicator. At about 20% (yes, all I could do at that point was stare at the screen wondering what the hell was going on), the PC automatically restarted, and as I’m sure you can imagine, couldn’t boot anymore.

Ok, I’m just kidding.

After all the stories appearing about Visual Studio and SQL Server 2005 on various websites, which I’m sure you’ve seen, I couldn’t resist. I’ve been using Visual Studio 2005 for a while now, and personally have yet to run into a bug or have it crash. And no, I’m not just writing “Hello world!” programs, although that seems to be enough to crash the IDE for some people. I will admit that it does feel slower than Visual Studio .NET 2003 but that is to be expected. I can still remember the day I installed Visual C++ 6 and how I complained about it being so much slower on my machine compared to Visual C++ 5. At that time I also didn’t own a really fast machine. One of the things that made Visual C++ 6 slower was, I believe, the introduction of IntelliSense in the IDE. But as time went by I got used to it, got faster PCs and now I can’t imagine working without IntelliSense. So I think we’ll get used to Visual Studio 2005.

But others do seem to be having some problems with Visual Studio 2005, and there do seem to be bugs in the IDE which you can occasionally run into. It should be noted that some “bugs” can also occur when people fail to completely uninstall previous beta versions of Visual Studio 2005, and that they should make sure they’ve installed on a clean system before they start complaining about having to deal with weird problems. This is one of the issues I have with the CTPs Microsoft is doing. It’s a good idea to release early builds to developers and consumers, but they have to make sure these can be completely and easily removed, and not cause issues when the user installs newer or final versions of the software.

Let’s also not forget that the concept of bugs in the Visual Studio IDE is not new. Visual Studio .NET 2003 has a lot of IDE bugs, some of which I’ve had to deal with almost daily for years now. And it still is one of the most popular IDEs available right now. However, this should not be seen as some kind of comfort for Microsoft; being the best and ahead of others should not mean that you should want to get away with less quality in your products. If there are issues, they should be fixed as soon as possible, and the best thing is always to avoid those issues in the first place and release quality code to customers.

Seeing Somasegar’s recent comments, I’m confident things will get better for the next release. There’s already one service pack planned for Visual Studio 2005 in 2006. That sure is much faster than the service pack for Visual Studio .NET 2003. I’m still wondering why they couldn’t release an update for Visual Studio .NET 2003 earlier.

As for SQL Server 2005, did anyone else notice how Oracle released a free express edition of their database just a few days before the release of SQL Server 2005? Do you think that’s a coincidence? It seems to me that Oracle is beginning to react to SQL Server. They appear to be taking it a little more serious now. And seeing the improvements that went into SQL Server 2005, its quite understandable. Soon they will have to lower their prices as well as SQL Server finds its way into enterprises more and more. Even the express edition is quite powerful and sometimes I still can’t believe it is provided for free. I remember the day I found out about MSDE (the previous version of SQL Server 2005 Express Edition), and searched everywhere to verify licensing information for MSDE and the fact that it was free.

In a previous article I had mentioned that Microsoft would be releasing the express editions of the Visual Studio tools free of charge. While this wasn’t yet announced by Microsoft, and was just based on my own thoughts, I was very glad to see Microsoft actually offering the tools for free so everyone can download and start developing, just like with SQL Server 2005 Express Edition. Right now they’ve said that the tools will be free for just one year after the release date. My thoughts are that they probably want to give them away for free even after one year, but perhaps are afraid of legal issues. I believe that keeping the simple express editions free is the right thing to do, both for Microsoft and all the young developers out there.

I’ll save my opinion about .NET Framework 2.0 for another post, but I am still not satisfied because of the lack of a clear roadmap with regards to the technologies that will be supported going forward. It’s still not very clear what is going to happen with MFC for example. All we know right now is that it is still supported in Visual Studio 2005 but no significant improvements are being added, and MFC’s role in the managed world is not very clear. There’s no clear replacement for MFC for the managed world. I know Microsoft is looking at these things right now, but it is important that they release their plans for at least the coming 5 years so developers know what they will be up against. The .NET Framework 2.0 is certainly an improvement over the previous version, but I still think things will get really exciting when WinFX gets released with Windows Vista.