I have seen no small number of complaints and bugs regarding Visual 
Studio 2008.  What is the professional opinion as to whether it's worth 
installing VS 2008 as is, or whether people should wait until the first 
service pack?



Stephen

"Stephen"  wrote in message 
news:MP6dnYZ6n9IVkQ_VnZ2dnUVZ_g6dnZ2d@giganews.com...
>
>    I have seen no small number of complaints and bugs regarding Visual 
> Studio 2008.  What is the professional opinion as to whether it's worth 
> installing VS 2008 as is, or whether people should wait until the first 
> service pack?
>
>
>
> Stephen
>
"worth installing" is a pretty vague phrase. Taken at face value, the answer 
is: of course. What do you have to lose if you install it, work with it to 
see how well it works for you, then uninstall it if you don't like it. AMOF, 
I believe you can still download a free 90 day trial.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/products/aa700831.aspx

If you really meant "worth paying for" or "worth using to develop software I 
make my living by", my experience is that you'll be fine. I don't know where 
you are seeing "no small number of complaints...", but it's worth 
remembering that the people who post in newsgroups and forums are usually 
doing so to get help with an issue, not to offer gratuitous praise. 
Therefore you won't see many posts saying that a person "is a happy user 
since release and has installed VS 2008 in numerous offices, classrooms and 
labs with excellent results". (That would be me).

On Thu, 31 Jul 2008 15:03:36 -0400, Stephen wrote:

> I have seen no small number of complaints and bugs regarding Visual
> Studio 2008.  What is the professional opinion as to whether it's worth
> installing VS 2008 as is, or whether people should wait until the first
> service pack?

I have been using VS 2008 for development.  The only problems I have had 
have been mine :-)  No major bugs and I have only seen it crash once in 
about 2 1/2 months, multiple clicks on a very loaded system did break 
it.  It recovered itself fine though.

Ken

"PvdG42"  wrote in message 
news:eonWUR18IHA.5992@TK2MSFTNGP04.phx.gbl...
>
> "worth installing" is a pretty vague phrase. Taken at face value, the 
> answer is: of course. What do you have to lose if you install it, work 
> with it to see how well it works for you, then uninstall it if you don't 
> like it. AMOF, I believe you can still download a free 90 day trial.
>
> http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/products/aa700831.aspx
>
> If you really meant "worth paying for" or "worth using to develop software 
> I make my living by", my experience is that you'll be fine.


    I have a client who owns VS 2008, but is currently using VS 2005 - 
they're looking for a recommendation as to whether it's ready to move to or 
not.

    And "worth installing" isn't that vague a phrase, if you think about it. 
If VS 2008 is not yet stable, or has significant bugs that significantly 
affect compilation or get in the way of development, than that would be a 
pretty good justification for saying that it's not worth installing yet.


    As to what is there to lose by trying it - that depends on whether there 
are any issues that affect the O/S, and whether those issues are reversable 
by uninstalling.  MS is well known for apps that change the O/S and cannot 
truly be uninstalled.


> I don't know where you are seeing "no small number of complaints...", but 
> it's worth remembering that the people who post in newsgroups and forums 
> are usually doing so to get help with an issue, not to offer gratuitous 
> praise. Therefore you won't see many posts saying that a person "is a 
> happy user since release and has installed VS 2008 in numerous offices, 
> classrooms and labs with excellent results". (That would be me).
>

    I understand.  But I'm looking for the experience of those people.  If I 
get a large number of people saying that VS 2008 is unstable, or the 
resulting builds are untrustworthy, that's something I want to know.




Stephen

"Ken Foskey"  wrote in message 
news:48923e53$1@dnews.tpgi.com.au...
> On Thu, 31 Jul 2008 15:03:36 -0400, Stephen wrote:
>
> I have been using VS 2008 for development.  The only problems I have had
> have been mine :-)  No major bugs and I have only seen it crash once in
> about 2 1/2 months, multiple clicks on a very loaded system did break
> it.  It recovered itself fine though.
>
> Ken
>


    That's good to know.  I remember seeing a number of reports saying that 
VS 2008 was particularly slow.  Have you encountered that?



Stephen

On Sun, 03 Aug 2008 20:03:13 -0400, Stephen wrote:

> "Ken Foskey"  wrote in message
> news:48923e53$1@dnews.tpgi.com.au...
>> On Thu, 31 Jul 2008 15:03:36 -0400, Stephen wrote:
>>
>> I have been using VS 2008 for development.  The only problems I have
>> had have been mine :-)  No major bugs and I have only seen it crash
>> once in about 2 1/2 months, multiple clicks on a very loaded system did
>> break it.  It recovered itself fine though.
>>
>> Ken
>>
>>
> 
>     That's good to know.  I remember seeing a number of reports saying
>     that
> VS 2008 was particularly slow.  Have you encountered that?

I have nothing to compare to,  I have never used 2005.   There are times 
where the intellisense is really slow. It is a low priority thread on the 
computer as it should be.  I have a new reasonably speced laptop with 
2gig and it works fine.    I am not building massive applications though.

Ken

Ken Foskey wrote:
> On Sun, 03 Aug 2008 20:03:13 -0400, Stephen wrote:
> 
>> "Ken Foskey"  wrote in message
>> news:48923e53$1@dnews.tpgi.com.au...
>>> On Thu, 31 Jul 2008 15:03:36 -0400, Stephen wrote:
>>>
>>> I have been using VS 2008 for development.  The only problems I have
>>> had have been mine :-)  No major bugs and I have only seen it crash
>>> once in about 2 1/2 months, multiple clicks on a very loaded system did
>>> break it.  It recovered itself fine though.
>>>
>>> Ken
>>>
>>>
>>     That's good to know.  I remember seeing a number of reports saying
>>     that
>> VS 2008 was particularly slow.  Have you encountered that?
> 
> I have nothing to compare to,  I have never used 2005.   There are times 
> where the intellisense is really slow. It is a low priority thread on the 
> computer as it should be.  I have a new reasonably speced laptop with 
> 2gig and it works fine.    I am not building massive applications though.
> 
> Ken
> 

They changed intellisense and sometimes it is just downright impossible 
to use.  As an example I have an app which uses a commercial webservice 
with lots of objects.  I had to move the webservice to a dll in order to 
  use VS 2008.  If you use edit and continue I have had lots of problems 
with it but only in modules that use Linq.

Actually Linq is the only reason I can see to switch unless you are 
going to use XAML.

Just my two cents.

LS

If you want to learn WPF applications like Web 2.0 rich media web
page, XAML, Silverlight stuff, Windows Mobile smartphone, pocket pc,
then install VS2008 Professional Edition. I agree the uninstallation
of the package is quite troublesome. Overall, it offers more features
than VS2005, of course.


On Aug 1, 3:03 am, "Stephen"  wrote:
>     I have seen no small number of complaints and bugs regarding Visual
> Studio 2008.  What is the professional opinion as to whether it's worth
> installing VS 2008 as is, or whether people should wait until the first
> service pack?
>
> Stephen

"Stephen"  wrote in message 
news:MP6dnYZ6n9IVkQ_VnZ2dnUVZ_g6dnZ2d@giganews.com...
>
>    I have seen no small number of complaints and bugs regarding Visual 
> Studio 2008.  What is the professional opinion as to whether it's worth 
> installing VS 2008 as is, or whether people should wait until the first 
> service pack?
>
>
>
> Stephen
>
>

My shop has actually seen quite a few problems with Visual Studio 2008.  The 
"fix" for the largest problem (5+ minute "hang" of Visual Studio when 
switching from Source view to Design view on a very large project in an 
.aspx file) is ready but not available until SP1 RTM....it's not even 
available in the SP1 Beta for some reason which sucks for us because we have 
to work on large projects contantly...and we already made the move to 
upgrade the Solution to .Net Framework 3.5.  Most of the other problems have 
been fixed in the SP1 Beta.

But still, I do have to say that the benefits of the upgrade definitely 
outweighs the drawbacks...

HTH,
Mythran

I've been running VS2008 since betas on several machines.  I've had no 
problems on XP or 2008 Server. On Vista it crashes quite often, but restarts 
and recovers.  I rarely lose anything.  At first it was so slow in a few 
areas that made it was almost unusable, but now it is running fine.  I don't 
know if MS pushed a EBF or something.  One of the things that makes me stay 
with 2008 is a simple thing but for me a real + and that the is the handling 
of CSS.

"Stephen"  wrote in message 
news:MP6dnYZ6n9IVkQ_VnZ2dnUVZ_g6dnZ2d@giganews.com...
>
>    I have seen no small number of complaints and bugs regarding Visual 
> Studio 2008.  What is the professional opinion as to whether it's worth 
> installing VS 2008 as is, or whether people should wait until the first 
> service pack?
>
>
>
> Stephen
>
>

Thank you for your input, everyone.  It sounds like if possible, it 
would be best to wait for SP1, so that's what I will recommend.



Stephen

"Stephen"  wrote in message 
news:NMSdnbtloLne2gvVnZ2dnUVZ_gCdnZ2d@giganews.com...
>
> "Ken Foskey"  wrote in message 
> news:48923e53$1@dnews.tpgi.com.au...
>> On Thu, 31 Jul 2008 15:03:36 -0400, Stephen wrote:
>>
>> I have been using VS 2008 for development.  The only problems I have had
>> have been mine :-)  No major bugs and I have only seen it crash once in
>> about 2 1/2 months, multiple clicks on a very loaded system did break
>> it.  It recovered itself fine though.
>>
>> Ken
>>
>
>
>    That's good to know.  I remember seeing a number of reports saying that 
> VS 2008 was particularly slow.  Have you encountered that?
>
>

There are places where it's slow with no reason. For example, switching from 
one source window to another (C++ files) takes like 1/2 of a second. This is 
so fcking annoying. Like the delay is artificial.

When you start it first time it takes several minutes "to prepare your 
settings". I dunno, it's possible to copy a gigabyte of disk file in 30 
seconds (60 MB/s is modern disk speed), or perform billions of floating 
point operations. What it's doing that time is mystery.

Search in the helpfile is slow. Even online MSDN search is faster.

And these are only annoyances I found today, because I installed the beast 
only an hour ago.

To fix that slow switching from file to file, I deleted the NCB file.

"Alexander Grigoriev"  wrote in message 
news:ea$vfbp%23IHA.4196@TK2MSFTNGP05.phx.gbl...
>
> "Stephen"  wrote in message 
> news:NMSdnbtloLne2gvVnZ2dnUVZ_gCdnZ2d@giganews.com...
>>
>> "Ken Foskey"  wrote in message 
>> news:48923e53$1@dnews.tpgi.com.au...
>>> On Thu, 31 Jul 2008 15:03:36 -0400, Stephen wrote:
>>>
>>> I have been using VS 2008 for development.  The only problems I have had
>>> have been mine :-)  No major bugs and I have only seen it crash once in
>>> about 2 1/2 months, multiple clicks on a very loaded system did break
>>> it.  It recovered itself fine though.
>>>
>>> Ken
>>>
>>
>>
>>    That's good to know.  I remember seeing a number of reports saying 
>> that VS 2008 was particularly slow.  Have you encountered that?
>>
>>
>
> There are places where it's slow with no reason. For example, switching 
> from one source window to another (C++ files) takes like 1/2 of a second. 
> This is so fcking annoying. Like the delay is artificial.
>
> When you start it first time it takes several minutes "to prepare your 
> settings". I dunno, it's possible to copy a gigabyte of disk file in 30 
> seconds (60 MB/s is modern disk speed), or perform billions of floating 
> point operations. What it's doing that time is mystery.
>
> Search in the helpfile is slow. Even online MSDN search is faster.
>
> And these are only annoyances I found today, because I installed the beast 
> only an hour ago.
>
>

Comments in context...

"Stephen"  wrote in message 
news:JICdncBOmOKO2gvVnZ2dnUVZ_o2dnZ2d@giganews.com...
>
> "PvdG42"  wrote in message 
> news:eonWUR18IHA.5992@TK2MSFTNGP04.phx.gbl...
>>
>> "worth installing" is a pretty vague phrase. Taken at face value, the 
>> answer is: of course. What do you have to lose if you install it, work 
>> with it to see how well it works for you, then uninstall it if you don't 
>> like it. AMOF, I believe you can still download a free 90 day trial.
>>
>> http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/products/aa700831.aspx
>>
>> If you really meant "worth paying for" or "worth using to develop 
>> software I make my living by", my experience is that you'll be fine.
>
>
>    I have a client who owns VS 2008, but is currently using VS 2005 - 
> they're looking for a recommendation as to whether it's ready to move to 
> or not.
Now that you've explained that, my recommendation would be to go ahead.
>
>    And "worth installing" isn't that vague a phrase, if you think about 
> it. If VS 2008 is not yet stable, or has significant bugs that 
> significantly affect compilation or get in the way of development, than 
> that would be a pretty good justification for saying that it's not worth 
> installing yet.
>
I've encountered no "show stopper" bugs. YMMV.
>
>    As to what is there to lose by trying it - that depends on whether 
> there are any issues that affect the O/S, and whether those issues are 
> reversable by uninstalling.  MS is well known for apps that change the O/S 
> and cannot truly be uninstalled.
>
I've not seen anything in VS 2005 or VS 2008 that caused OS issues when 
installed or uninstalled. YMMV.
>
>> I don't know where you are seeing "no small number of complaints...", but 
>> it's worth remembering that the people who post in newsgroups and forums 
>> are usually doing so to get help with an issue, not to offer gratuitous 
>> praise. Therefore you won't see many posts saying that a person "is a 
>> happy user since release and has installed VS 2008 in numerous offices, 
>> classrooms and labs with excellent results". (That would be me).
>>
>
>    I understand.  But I'm looking for the experience of those people.  If 
> I get a large number of people saying that VS 2008 is unstable, or the 
> resulting builds are untrustworthy, that's something I want to know.

How will you judge "large number"? If you see a few dozen posts, is that 
large? If you see 100 and there are 300,000 installations worldwide (pure 
guess) is that enough to deter you? Would it make sense to suggest that your 
client install VS 2008 on one machine and see how it goes *in your client's 
environment* before fully committing?

>
>
>
>
> Stephen
>
>