[achn]

I don’t see how anyone can have this opinion. If you are producing code for which VS was designed (.net for example) it is obviously and definitely one of the greatest IDEs ever produced. If you are having to fight with VS, then you may not be using it for one of its main use cases. I certainly don’t think it is perfect (git support being quite annoying at times) but to say that it isn’t an incredible achievement is ridiculous.

[strictfp]

I'm one! I work with VS daily and I think it's pretty bad. Some examples; I cannot get a plain folder view. Intellisense is very inept compared to Jetbrains products. Bad refactor support, can't find things you're looking for etc. File tabs are hard to keep organized. The source control support has been worst of the worst up util recently (blame view taking minutes to show up etc), and now it's only mediocre. Best way to find stuff is through "find all", which is an order of magnitude slower than grep. "Track changes" resets on file close, not when you save or commit, making it rather useless. VS also crashes quite frequently if you aren't gentle with keypresses. Single-threaded plugin model causing keyboard input lag. Etc etc. I could go on.

The good parts of VS is hot-reload (when it works), the debugger, and the profiler. Otherwise I'm not a fan.

[jchw]

>I cannot get a plain folder view.

Like this?

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jchv/files/main/devenv_G81...

Use the "Switch between solutions and available views" button and select "Folder view." Seems about right to me.

> Visual assist is very inept compared to Jetbrains products

Jetbrains does have better refactoring, but you don't really have to choose one or the other; Resharper and Resharper C++ give you the best of both worlds. Jetbrains is missing some stuff that Visual Studio can do, too. Visual Studio does some static analysis to detect out-of-bounds errors and other mistakes, which is useful to have as quick feedback in the IDE, in my opinion.

[throwawayboise]

Last time I had to use Visual Studio (about 10 years ago) I used emacs to write my C# code and used Visual Studio to manage the "project" and run builds. Mainly because I had 2 decades of Emacs muscle memory and I kept fighting it in VS (yes, I tried the emacs keybindings in VS).

[unbanned]

>I cannot get a plain folder view

Yes you can. Change from solution view to folder view.

>The good parts of VS is hot-reload (when it works), the debugger, and the profiler

So everything you want from an IDE?

What are you actually angry at?

[FridgeSeal]

To add to this list: if something happens on disk it practically has an aneurysm. VSCode and JetBrains products cope without even blinking.

[n8cpdx]

Try programming for Xamarin, UWP, or anything involving multitargeting.

The list of actions for which closing visual studio, deleting a bunch of random folders, and restarting is long. Unfortunately it includes any changes to project files, because the project system is super broken with anything multitargeting related. That basically means I have to completely restart my IDE and run a script to clean everything maybe 15 times a day. And fuck me if I’m trying to find where a regression happened (which means changing dependencies, which live in the csproj).

I remember when I didn’t have to restart VS 30 times a day, and memorize which build errors actually aren’t errors, and do random sequences of events to work around bugs, and memorize which unsuppressable warnings are legitimate and which are not. Before those days, Visual Studio was indeed an incredible accomplishment.

[lazulicurio]

> Try programming for Xamarin, UWP, or anything involving multitargeting.

The complaints in the original article fell rather flat to me, but this is one area where it's absolutely fair to criticize VS. More generally, the reason that build tooling in the .net sphere is such a mess is because of historical baggage from VS.

With that said, if you're coloring within the lines[1], VS is very powerful and productive.

[1] To an extent. There definitely are use cases that are "supported" only in name.

[garren]

I used VS for years across a couple of C/C++/C# projects, and it was second to none with one exception.

The exception was Xamarin/Xamarin.Forms. Seriously, congrats to the Xamarin people for getting that project going, but it was (at least into Xamarin.Forms 1-3) more than a little hacky and extremely frustrating. Granted, it kind of had to be though given that it was intended for a broader audience targeting completely different platforms, and at least initially didn't have a lot of MS support iirc.

I think the issues surrounding cross-platform targeting were/are less a problem with the IDE itself than what it was/is forced to work with. The whole iOS "code in VS on Windows, but build on a Mac" was a nightmare, I don't know if things have gotten any better.

[phillipcarter]

>I remember when I didn’t have to restart VS 30 times a day, and memorize which build errors actually aren’t errors, and do random sequences of events to work around bugs, and memorize which unsuppressable warnings are legitimate and which are not. Before those days, Visual Studio was indeed an incredible accomplishment.

This is because the software you're building today is far more complicated than before (from the IDE's perspective), and it doesn't do a good job of keeping up. There's a reason why so many people jump to VSCode these days - it gives you less bells and whistles, but it won't blow up on you when you try to do something moderately complex.

[phillipcarter]

> If you are having to fight with VS, then you may not be using it for one of its main use cases.

So I worked on VS tooling for a few years and I'm proud of what me and my peers achieved, but I don't think this is the right perspective. People should not be surprised by the behavior of their tools, and they should not be frustrated by random freezes or crashes all of the time. What the person you're replying to has experienced is very real - I saw it come up again and again and again in reports - and I hope that things improve for them with subsequent releases.

VS 2022 is a fantastic new release (64-bit solves so many perf and user-perceived reliability issues), but there is so much more to go. VS still relies on a very very old COM-based UI model with one of the most convoluted and complex threading models to manage it that I've ever seen. It's so easy for any little component to mess things up, hang the UI, and make someone have a terrible experience. I know folks on the inside are working to improve this dramatically (they know roughly how to do it), but it's a long road ahead.

[SantiagoElf]

You should be very proud. I remember the early .NET 2.0/3.0 days where you had to have ReSharper installed and it made VS almost unusable. Nowadays (the last 5-6 years) I use Visual Studio without any third party extensions - it's a blast!

I believe Visual Studio to be one of the crown jewels of Microsoft.

[ripley12]

I'm not sure you can comment on this, but: any idea what the long-term plan is for UI in Visual Studio?

WPF has been more-or-less abandoned by the Windows team, and that's a little scary since VS uses WPF so much...

[temac]

> 64-bit solves so many perf and user-perceived reliability issues

I love how in tech everything is always evil one day and the next one nearly the panacea. Now I understand the timing component is actually not to get rid of entirely, in the sense that maybe a 64-bit VS would have been a bad idea the year AMD released x64, but among the stated reasons to stick to 32-bits not so long ago, and even one of the main, there was: performance.

I suspect the cold reality was that the code base was not ready and the migration just took some time :)

[blibble]

> I don’t see how anyone can have this opinion.

it's pretty common amongst those who used Delphi 15 years ago (or those that use JetBrains products today)

[hermitdev]

I've been a long time VS user. Started with Visual C++ 6... In my experience, it's never been a straight forward conclusion of version X is better than the one before. With each release, it does somethings better, or new, but others worse, sometimes cripplingly so. And one of the most frustrating things for the longest time was that if you needed a specific C++ compiler major version, you were stuck using the specific VS version that shipped with the compiler (unless you were willing to ditch projects and go with makefiles). Only in 2019 did that finally change. And speed of the IDE itself has been dodgy at times, even for brand new projects. I've tried the 2022 preview (I have not yet tried RTM), and there are excruciating pauses in the UI for seconds to create a new file in an empty project! But, there are great new features in there, too...

Like Pretzold, I have a love hate relationship with IntelliSense. I think I can boil down my gripes with this: IntelliSense is wonderful for consuming APIs. It is an active hindrance for writing/designing APIs. It is great for telling you about what exists, but falls on its face when you're trying to write something new. If I am undoing the suggestions I didn't want, yet it insisted on placing, it is counterproductive. Personally, I get rather tired of slapping the escape key to cancel IntelliSense multiple times just so I can write out a dotted expression.

[amelius]

> If you are producing code for which VS was designed

That's literally what GP is trying to say: "either you do it the VS way or screw you."

[cma]

> to say that it isn’t an incredible achievement is ridiculous

It takes like 20s to search source filenames of large projects, with fast SSD and 64 cores.

[fivea]

> I don’t see how anyone can have this opinion. If you are producing code for which VS was designed (.net for example) it is obviously and definitely one of the greatest IDEs ever produced.

Hard disagree. VS makes code harder to navigate than any other popular IDE out there to the point where even vscode is more intuitive and capable, it's extremely slow at that too, and makes even the tiniest change to a build config something that requires jumping through a myriad arcane menus.

Having used other IDEs to develop Java, C# and C++ code, the only explanation I can find to explain Visual Studio's adoption, besides privileged access to Microsoft's emergent technologies and frameworks, is the boiling frogs analogy.

> If you are having to fight with VS, then you may not be using it for one of its main use cases.

I guess that writing software and building projects are not Visual Studio's main use cases, then.

[joenathanone]

Lately VS has been breaking my code with its autocomplete, for example lets say I'm working on a web project and want to wrap an element in a div, I may have some existing code I want to reuse so I will copy and paste the opening tag for example, <div style="some styling" class="class1 class2 class3">, then I will hand code the closing tag like so, </div> but VS will 'correct' it to this </div>> for some reason and my code wont work, I start debugging only to find that the autocomplete has again broken my code.

[ejb999]

Couldn't agree more - love visual studio (on windows), and vs code even more (lighter weight, but less features) when I am on a mac or ubuntu.

Also use Visual Studio on the Mac - that one I could agree is terrible - but hope it will improve over time.

Probably helps that I have used every version of VS since it was released - so like anything else, if you are used to it and use it every day for 20+ years you become biased - but for C# programming, imo, nothing even comes close.

[wsc981]

On the Mac I use Rider which is in many ways a huge improvement over Visual Studio. No visual editing of XAML files though, so I am slowly migrating the codebase to use views fully written in C#.

[blitzd]

Not all portions of VS are maintained to the same degree - their BI tools were horrible for years, and there was not much in the way of alternatives. I'd often spend more time fixing/triaging the IDE issues than I would my own code/projects. And when you then start to add multiple versions of VS into the mix (this was required for the BI projects + newest SQL Server database projects) it gets even worse.

[leetcrew]

I would think visual c++ must be one of the intended use cases. it's far from the worst c++ ide, but it can be pretty frustrating. you basically can't trust "find all references" in large projects.