Impressions of VS2008 after a couple of weeks

I've spent some quality time with Visual Studio 2008 now after two weeks, and I feel like I can give a more extensive impression of the product. Aside from my previous complaint about the FTP browser, I've really enjoyed working with it, but I do sometimes feel a little underwhelmed.

Let me get some of the negatives out of the way up front. At first there was no usable build of ReSharper, and going back to life without it isn't fun. Sure, it doesn't yet support the new features of C#, but the refactoring, formatting and inspection tools that the product brings to VS really are essential. While VS has a lot of tools to isolate you from coding (as is expected of an IDE), ReSharper has a lot of tools that help you write better and cleaner code. I mean, Alt+Enter alone is worth the price of admission (adds an import statement for the namespace of the type you just tried to type automagically).

I was really hoping that the giant web.config would go away with the integration of the AJAX stuff, but it's actually bigger than ever. I expected that at least the various HttpHandler overrides would go away, but apparently that wasn't in the cards. 

The new CSS stuff is surprisingly not as useful as I expected it might be. That's kind of a buzz kill. In fact, there are times when I experimented with the designer and was surprised to see that what I was composing was not how the page actually appeared in IE. It also seems to crash, a lot, when I'm editing a style sheet. That might be ReSharper causing that, which is a little weird since I don't think it touches CSS, but I'm sure the validation engine has something to do with it.

The killer feature is easily the client-side script debugging. If you really embrace the coding model that the AJAX framework uses, this feature is gold. If you've read one of the AJAX books and still can't wrap your head around it, read it again or read another, because once you get it and use it, it's amazing stuff. It's a little annoying to have to use IE, but I'm mostly over it.

I've only toyed with LINQ, and I guess I still haven't learned enough about it to make me say, "Wow, that's awesome stuff I must use as much as possible!" I'm sure that's just a matter of time. The general improvements to C#, like the automatic properties for example, are big time savers. I feel like I haven't explored those enough.

Other than that, it does feel a little more snappy and building seems to be much faster. It's not a huge upgrade, but definitely one you should consider if you haven't already, if for the script stuff alone (assuming you're an ASP.NET developer). Like I said, I feel a little underwhelmed, but it's familiar and fast and generally steady. I like that they're practically giving it away at various Microsoft events too. Giving it away to sell server product is a wise strategy.

7 Comments

  • Well it gets the big thumbs down from me. All the pros don't outweigh this one big Con. I still have a lot of legacy classic asp code mixed in with my asp.net pages. The shear volume of the classic asp pages means they won't go away soon. Removing the syntax coloring for classic asp that was there in Visual Studio 2005 makes the conversion even harder for me. Visual Studio 2008 does let me debug those pages using the stop keyword still, but it always crashes after I'm done debugging.

  • How about giving me a copy of Visual Studio 2008? I used to get Visual Studio from my employer's MSDN subscription but my current employer has not given me access to that. I suppose it does not matter because I'm still doing most of my work in Visual Studio 2003. :(

  • Hi Jeff,

    I hope you understand the reason for the large web.config file. Obviously Microsoft wanted to make this an upgrade that could be installed on machine with ASP.NET 2.0 without breaking anything. So in other words, the web server considers (in IIS for example) you are still just running ASP.NET 2 and thus the extra features are introduced via web.config. Sure they could have introduced an entire new version, and had you select "ASP.NET 3.5" in IIS, but overall the current solution is probably the best and most incremental way of upgrading sites, and avoiding production errors.

    The CSS features were crashing a lot of me with Beta 2 (and even crashed for ScottGu when he presented at Mix UK in September), but I have not played with it on RTM.

    Overall I love the RTM product. Seriously - this is an amazing product, and I do not agree with your sentiment.

    David

  • "It also seems to crash, a lot, when I'm editing a style sheet." -- I had this happen to me a few times, and most of the times the Resharper "catches" the problem and asks what you were doing. Of course it still restarts the IDE. I believe this is a Resharper issue.

    I feel underwhelmed myself. Having CSS support, mainly the dropdown after class or CssClass is really cool except that it only works in certain cases -- when it knows where the css file is coming from. It's really an undercooked feature. I'm working with user controls and pages that have their style sheet themes set at runtime or with dynamic master pages. In all these cases it can't figure out where the css is going to come from and it underlines the css class for me, which I find rather annoying. It should allow me give it a hint or some sort of way to specify where the css is coming from and make this feature actually useful.

    Another thing that I was looking forward is assigning event handlers without going into design mode. Well, you can, but you still have to have the designer loaded either in split view or after a full switch to the designer. In all other cases the properties window is just useless, so really nothing changed here.

    The designer is quicker than the old one, not much quicker though, but now there's a first time access delay from the time you switched to the designer and you can actually see the rendered form and the time the properties window is updated. This delay can be a few seconds long so you're just sitting there wondering what's going on and then it just shows up. They kind of broke this one in my opinion.

    Yes, it's somewhat faster and has all the cool new features like LINQ and the language improvements, but I feel the actual IDE hasn't changed that much. There are number of things that I feel should have improved that haven't.

    Ohh well...

  • Greg....I agree 100% that lack of classic asp support is a huge huge let down. That alone will keep me in 2005 for a long time.

  • Wow, I'm really surprised anyone is still using old ASP.

  • @Jeff better believe it. I've got a mixed ASP/ASP.net website. The Classic ASP code is colorized in VS2008 and I can debug it too. I find that using VS2008 to debug Classic ASP all too often produces the COM "Switch to/Continue waiting" dialog which requires TaskMan to kill.

    A final thought - it was easier to integrate a solid, secure HTML Sanitizer into Classic ASP than it was into ASP.Net (ie Caja JsHtmlSanitizer vs AntiSwamy).

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