Amazon reviews of VS.NET 2005 not very good!

  • Thread starter Thread starter John A. Bailo
  • Start date Start date
John said:
I was pricing VS.NET Professional 2005 upgrade and found a good price on
Amazon -- but then I read the customer reviews and they were terrible:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B000BT8TRG/ref=pd_kar_3/103-1460775-6910259


For example:

"Lots of nifty features, but unfortunately it needs a few more months of
development before it will really be stable. "

Can it be that buggy?
Click to expand...

Say, you're not basing your expectations or opinions based on a couple
"reviews" by basically anyone, are you? Especially when one is about a
beta version, and the other seems like he has totally no clue (sounds
like he doesn't know what he's doing)...
 
Well I don't need no Amazon review because I've been trying to use this
product since day one and the answer is unequivocally yes, it can be that
buggy because it is that buggy, but let's look on the bright side. It could
be worse.

My complaints:

* Mangles HTML
* 2.0 compiler is buggy (I have to close VS, stop IIS, delete temp files,
and restart almost everyday)
* Big fat slow cow

<%= Clinton Gallagher
METROmilwaukee (sm) "A Regional Information Service"
NET csgallagher AT metromilwaukee.com
URL http://metromilwaukee.com/
URL http://clintongallagher.metromilwaukee.com/
 
clintonG said:
Well I don't need no Amazon review because I've been trying to use this
product since day one and the answer is unequivocally yes, it can be that
buggy because it is that buggy, but let's look on the bright side. It
could be worse.

My complaints:

* Mangles HTML
Click to expand...

In what respect? On a clean machine, I do not see this issue.
* 2.0 compiler is buggy (I have to close VS, stop IIS, delete temp files,
and restart almost everyday)
Click to expand...

Have not had this happen once on my machine. Lucky? Possibly.
* Big fat slow cow
Click to expand...

Have not had this issue either.

I am not doubting you, but I do not know the parameters you are testing
with. During beta, I had issues (some due to running in a VPC, of course).
Since release, I see a few minor things, but nothing like you report here.

--
Gregory A. Beamer
MVP; MCP: +I, SE, SD, DBA

*************************************************
Think outside the box!
*************************************************
 
It is possible that many of the reviewers have either installed a beta or
have other OS problems. Look at the game reviews from a variety of games and
you will see the same thing. I have not had problems. There are a few things
I do not like, but I am overall happy (same with many of the games out there
that have been panned).

--
Gregory A. Beamer
MVP; MCP: +I, SE, SD, DBA

*************************************************
Think outside the box!
*************************************************
 
Just examine what you are talking about (should not have shot off my mouth
first?).

The standard edition is a mixutre of the express products with a few other
IDE features. And, personally, I would not buy it. On the other hand, I am a
professional developer and standard does not fit my bill. The Pro product
has better reviews (the nasty review is someone bitching about not being
able to get a free product). The Team Suite has no reviews ... at least not
yet. :-)

--
Gregory A. Beamer
MVP; MCP: +I, SE, SD, DBA

*************************************************
Think outside the box!
*************************************************
 
Ignore the reviews. I, for one, have maintained a great deal of disdain for
Visual Studio for over ten years. Besides the early issues of minimal to no
integration among the products, the IDE just never appealed to me. Starting
with Visual C++, then on to Visual InterDev and Visual Studio.NET, I did not
like the way the IDE mangled the source code as well as the amount of
extraneous code that I didn't need to accomplish my coding. So, during this
time (with the exception of using the IDE in Visual FoxPro), I chose to use
a text editor.

With VS 2005, I have to say that I think it's great as an overall package.
I am currently using the Express products, specifically Visual Web Developer
Express. I am currently developing an ASP.NET 2.0 website within VWD and I
really enjoy it. This is first time that I have ever lasted with a Visual
Studio product. Trust me, the fact that I'm using VS 2005 products is truly
high praise for Microsoft. (And I'm not a Kool-Aid drinker.....)
 
I've had ongoing problems with HTML. Particulary certain elements such as
list elements; dl and ul which get concatenated into a single line.
Something is removing the CRLFs. I don't use the designer so it is not white
space being removed.

I don't have a copy of the error message -- which was not much of a message
anyway -- but I've had ongoing problems where the page will not compile.
Some problem with the temporary instance. I have to close VS and IIS, delete
the temp directory and restart IIS and VS2005. This has occurred with inane
edits such as reformatting the dl or ul elements in the HTML and other
instances one might expect such as editing the attributes of a control.
Boom.

Finally, many people have complained about performance. I've discussed all
three circumstances with others and in the case of HTML mangles I learned
some of my observations were my own configuration yet no explanation has
come forth for the list elements nor the page compilation problem which
others have had, the general consensus being the close, delete, restart
process I described.

I did an install on the same disk where I have VS2003 and had Beta 2 but I
also installed on a clean disk. I had problems for weeks until I finally
learned there was a web.config statement that the RTM did not support. These
other issues I've described persist.

The only thing I can say now is to confrim the occurrences of the page
compilation problem have been greatly reduced if I run one and only one
instance of VS2005. I am often in the habit of running two instances with
different projects in each so as to copy and paste code from one to the
other. The page compilation problem occurred many times throughout the day
when running two instances of VS2005.

<%= Clinton Gallagher
 
John,

The final is as buggy as hell also, and even slower than what I imagine hell
could be.

This is the final VS straw for me, I've endured the VS series of crap and
once I'm done with these projects I'm moving to a different development
platform as it seems most of what MS do is purely to fool developers into an
approach that is not efficient, far from rapid when you really want to start
getting deep into it, and just runs slow.

Anyway, get a good set of opinions and do your own research and make the
decision. Good luck!
 
Turn off Indexing Services, that helps A LOT with some of the bugs -- but
does slow down VS even more.

I agree, buggy as hell is right -- my end users are NOT happy with it's
performance either -- espeically the slow initial load.
 
But don't ya think with all the resources available to Microsoft, they could
have gotten their core development platform right? VS 2005 is still WAY WAY
off where it should be had they followed a natural migration path and not a
lets start over path.

Rob.

Christopher Reed said:
Ignore the reviews. I, for one, have maintained a great deal of disdain
for Visual Studio for over ten years. Besides the early issues of minimal
to no integration among the products, the IDE just never appealed to me.
Starting with Visual C++, then on to Visual InterDev and Visual
Studio.NET, I did not like the way the IDE mangled the source code as well
as the amount of extraneous code that I didn't need to accomplish my
coding. So, during this time (with the exception of using the IDE in
Visual FoxPro), I chose to use a text editor.

With VS 2005, I have to say that I think it's great as an overall package.
I am currently using the Express products, specifically Visual Web
Developer Express. I am currently developing an ASP.NET 2.0 website
within VWD and I really enjoy it. This is first time that I have ever
lasted with a Visual Studio product. Trust me, the fact that I'm using VS
2005 products is truly high praise for Microsoft. (And I'm not a Kool-Aid
drinker.....)
Click to expand...
 
I probably won't change your mind, but I must disagree. VS 2005 is the
natural upgrade to VS.NET 2003. It's not perfect, but it's definitely not
bad.
 
That's odd. I've never had a single issue of markup being mangled by
it... Not even once - that was in fact one of the things I liked the
most about it.

Slow? Yes, to some extent - but again, it seems like almost everything
is becoming somewhat slow/bloated nowadays (Adobe Creative Suite CS2
anyone?). New features always seem to make this happen, but if it makes
you that much more productive because of the new features...

Buggy? I've had a couple glitches (intellisense related mainly), but
nothing serious, common or recurring, but true enough, I never have more
than one instance of it open. Nothing to make me give up on it or things
like that some people are mentioning.
 
Last night I tried to match some braces using ctrl-]
The code disappeared! I clicked into white space and part of the code
flashed back into view.
What next?

<%= Clinton Gallagher
 
I disabled the Start Page and startup is now acceptable.

Last night I got a new surprise and code disappeared when I tried to use
ctrl-] to match braces.

<%= Clinton Gallagher
 
What are the alternatives for ASP.NET?
It looks and feels like this is another five years of FrontPage all over
again.

<%= Clinton Gallagher

Rob R. Ainscough said:
John,

The final is as buggy as hell also, and even slower than what I imagine
hell could be.

This is the final VS straw for me, I've endured the VS series of crap and
once I'm done with these projects I'm moving to a different development
platform as it seems most of what MS do is purely to fool developers into
an approach that is not efficient, far from rapid when you really want to
start getting deep into it, and just runs slow.

Anyway, get a good set of opinions and do your own research and make the
decision. Good luck!
Click to expand...
 
We use VS .NET 2005 VB entirely in the 64 bit environment and our
application uses routinely 18gig of memory and has been remarkably
stable. I am really impressed with VS 2005 .NET. The only request is
that they fix the 64 bit environment so you can debug/change code in
place.
 
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