A few things I don’t like about VS2008

February 5, 2008 at 10:02 am · Filed under .NET

Last week I posted on some things I like about VS2008.  Here are some things that I don’t particularly like, or at least things that I wish had been updated.  Consider these feature requests for VS.NEXT (or TFS power toys) or a service pack.

• First of all, a bug.  It has a habit of closing itself.  I’m usually in the middle of a build when this happens.  It just goes “poof”.  Sometimes more than once a day.  Sometimes it does not repeat for days.

The rest of these are really just suggestions.  The Visual Studio Team will probably just roll their eyes and say “yeah, we know” or “why didn’t you suggest this before?”  Yeah.  Better late than never?

• While targeting older versions of .NET 2.0 is great, I wish there was read-only support for VS2005 projects without conversion.   The driver for down-level support must have been to remove barriers-to-sale for existing VS2005 customers, but read-only support would have been better.  Why?
  • So teams with a lot of projects can “convert as they go” and not need to do a wholesale conversion of everything.
  • To make it easier to maintain older versions of their product without having to keep VS2005 around.
• The source control diff tool needs to be updated.  My major annoyances?
  • It doesn’t use the same keyboard shortcuts as Visual Studio (or Office for that matter).  Alt-F3 for Find?
  • It can’t be minimized.  It can be resized, but why not minimized?
  • I would love to be able to diff with horizontal panes.  Since the code is so often wider than the pane, I have to scroll around.  This slows down changeset code audits.
• While I love the Excel view of TFS work items, we still cannot edit the entire item from Excel.  I really hoped this would have been added. 
• And on the subject of TFS, there should be a quick find feature built into the IDE.  Writing a query to do a find is too many steps.  We shouldn’t have to rely on outside tools for this (e.g., TFS Quick Search which hasn’t been updated yet).

Will there be more?  Certainly.  I haven’t spent much time with the new features of the IDE.  But I’m sure there will be a lot more that I like too — I’m very happy to be using the new IDE.

Tags: .NET, Microsoft, TFS, VS2008

Comments (2)

A few things I like about VS2008

January 28, 2008 at 6:18 pm · Filed under .NET

Leaving out all .NET enhancements, here are a few things I like about VS2008:

• Down-level .NET support.  This makes the upgrade much easier for those of us who still support older versions of Windows that don’t support the new versions of .NET.  I wish they had gone a step further — I’ll write that up in a companion post.
• Doesn’t require elevation.  I recently started using UAC again (i.e., I turned it back on) and found it annoying that I couldn’t drop files into VS2005 (since it runs elevated and Explorer does not).  It is important that VS2008 works unelevated, because UAC is important.  If you make it too hard for devs to use UAC, they’ll turn it off.  And as I know from personal experience, they won’t be as motivated to support it. 
• Supports application manifest files as a project property (instead of through custom post-build steps).  We just implemented this manually for the “Certified for Server 2008 Logo” and I was very happy to eliminate that in favor of direct tool support.
• It seems to start about 100 times faster than VS2005. I’m not kidding.
• The Source Control “Annotate” feature — glad it got rolled into the release.  I like the fact that it is available directly from the history menu, making it much easier to find when some line of code was introduced.

Just a few things.  I’m sure I’ll find more soon.

Tags: .NET, Microsoft, TFS, VS2008

Comments (1)

Microsoft Acquires TeamPlain

March 26, 2007 at 10:30 am · Filed under Miscellaneous

Very cool — I installed it this morning (now it is a free download) and had it working in munites.  This will make it so much easier for my company to handle the migration of our issue tracking from Gemini into TFS.

From bharry (excerpted heavily):

Today we are announcing that Microsoft has acquired DevBiz Business Solutions, the makers of the popular TeamPlain Web Access for Team System.  TeamPlain is a web front end for VSTS that enables users to access the majority of TFS functionality from within a Web browser.  The focus of TeamPlain is on work item tracking but it also includes some valuable version control capabilities (like viewing history/change sets, diffing files, browsing the source base, etc.), some SharePoint integration, Reporting services integration, and some upcoming build support.  TeamPlain gives VSTS a new avenue to reach a broader array of people within the development team who don’t use Visual Studio today and don’t want to install Visual Studio clients on their machines.  It also improves reach by enabling some access from non-Windows clients.

. . .

TeamPlain will become Microsoft Visual Studio Team System Web Access.  Effective today, TeamPlain is available, at no additional charge, to users who own a Team Foundation Server and can be downloaded from here.  It will be accessible by any user properly licensed with a TFS CAL.  Support will continue to be provided by the current staff via the DevBiz online forums.

Source: Microsoft Acquires TeamPlain!
Originally published on Mon, 26 Mar 2007 15:58:12 GMT by bharry

Tags: DevBiz, Microsoft, TeamPlain, TFS, VSTS

Comments

Into TFS

October 23, 2006 at 8:24 am · Filed under Miscellaneous

Over the last could of weeks, we at Digipede have been preparing to move out of the oh-so outdated VSS into Microsoft’s Team Foundation Server (TFS). 

This last weekend, we did the whole migration. 

My main reason for pushing this change: to make it easier for our team to concurrently develop on multiple branches.  This is fairly challenging in VSS due to its limitations.

So far, so good.  I’ll let you know more as we start to really use it.

Tags: Digipede, Microsoft, Source-Control, TFS, VS, VSS, VSTS

Comments