back to article Microsoft delays Visual Studio 2010 launch

Microsoft will delay the release of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 in order to have more time to address performance issues. The software giant said Friday it plans an additional test version — a release candidate — to launch in February while the tool set's engineering team focuses on improving performance. "As you …

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  1. fortyrunner

    Shock Horror

    Wow. So MS have performance issues in Visual Studio - who knew.

    After the pigs ear they made of the past two releases maybe they are taking it seriously now.

    What I would like from ANY IDE vendor is a Pure Coding edition. The bare minimum needed to code, refactor, test, run/debug. None of the enterprise crap you get these days.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Thumb Up

      Shock Horror...

      > What I would like from ANY IDE vendor is a Pure Coding edition. The bare minimum needed to code, refactor, test, run/debug. None of the enterprise crap you get these days.

      Its called VI. Although some prefer EMACS.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Happy

    Performance

    Since when did "performance" issues effect a MS softwae product from being released?

    If they did, they would never have released anything. Ever!

    1. amanfromMars 1 Silver badge
      Alien

      Champion Cyber Security Candidate Needed ...... Apply CampUS MS Redmond .....

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      "Since when did "performance" issues effect a MS softwae product from being released?" .... Anonymous Coward Posted Saturday 19th December 2009 18:09 GMT

      AC,

      It is never a performance issue which effects a MS software product release, it is always a captivating exclusivity with hidden stealth for ignorant** market dominant advantage. Plug in a Fix/Buy in an App which Guarantees the Future Secured in that Field, and Flagging Fortunes are Reversed and Enhanced beyond even the Measure of the Wildest Wacky Western Dreams.

      [And yes, there is an extraterrestrial explanation for all of this but it is proprietary earthy earthly information and thus does it require a Special Access Program with Marked UltraSensitive Coding for Base Knowledge Generation with ITs Enlightened and Enriching Understandings/AIdDynamIQ Flexibilities/Liquid Heuristic Competencies for Currency Flows with Colossal Power Unit Surges ........ Huge EMP Wave Machinations.***]

      * A Game Changing/Earth Moving/Knee Trembler Question of the MS Board and its Octopus Tentacled Management Streams/Teams/Crew.

      ** Ignorant in this case being a market to be kept unaware of true capabilities/a product which is resistant to reverse engineering core secret discovery.

      *** An explanation which although presently may be difficult to accept or fully understand, will be made much easier to comprehend as its elements are exposed to terrestrial market leaders/media moguls/El Capitalisti Nuovo ......... with ITs Quantum Underground Mirror Angels Cloned for Full Spectrum Control of the CyberIntelAIgent Range ........ Live Operational Virtual Environment Domain. And any Doubt about Anything which is hereby and herein Freely and Transparently Shared, are Yours, and is that which Holds up your Progress into Higher Planes of Existence and Better Beta Fields of Exalted and Elevating Great Games Work, Rest and Play.

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Stop

    not news

    There were (and still are) performance issues with all the earlier versions of Visual Studio, so it's hardly news.

    If they ever release a version which performs properly, THAT would be news.

    1. AndrueC Silver badge
      Thumb Down

      No kidding

      You should try it from the wrong end of a slow network connection.

      Nearly a minute from double click to responding to a menu command. Another half a minute to load almost any solution. Over a minute to close a solution!

      We've done everything we can to avoid accessing files across the network (we have a local mirror for assemblies and resources) but /still/ VS itself seems to want to reach out and touch the world.

      But the issues aren't just performance - it's often poor design. Why are .NET project options not occupying the entire screen width? Why do so many dialogs appear to have been designed to fit into 640x480? Why can't they at least remember when I resize them?

      Visual Studio seems mostly designed to get on my tits and up my nose much like Office 2007.

  4. Mike Shepherd
    FAIL

    Unusable

    I tried moving to the new beta of "Visual Web Developer" a few days ago but had to remove it immediately. The editor could handle no more than about one key a second (3GHz Pentium, 2Gb RAM).

    It didn't take long to find that many had found the performance to be unusable and that Microsoft knew about it. What were they thinking?

  5. Anonymous Coward
    FAIL

    Hint: Anything called "The best X in the world ever... Volume 4" isn't.

    By the time we'd reached "The best album ever, Volume 4", I was starting to wonder if maybe that mean the first three weren't, after all, the best ever, as they had earlier been described to us when each one was launched.

    Similarly, .NET was supposed to be The Best Windows Forms and Guis Framework in the World Ever. It was supposed to run everywhere, support all languages, and ground everything in one fundamental set of APIs and libraries that would serve all purposes.

    So why do we now find ourselves in the position of having to install and maintain FOUR very similar yet incompatible huge bloated best-ever, be-all-and-end-all frameworks (six actually if you bear in mind that 1.1 and 3.5 both had backwardly-incompatible changes over 1.0 and 3.0 respectively)? Yeah, that's right. Because it's a humungous fuck up. A massive ongoing slow-motion train wreck of a bloated over-engineered heap of shovel. How mentally incompetent do you have to be to think that, after three disasters, the best plan is to do the same thing all over again? Please god, someone, put MS out of all our misery!

    1. Pandy06269
      Go

      Re: The best X in the world ever

      Sorry to tell you but you're quite inaccurate in your statements.

      I've run .NET apps on Windows 2000, XP and Vista (haven't got around to trying 7 yet) without any changes - they do look slightly different on different platforms - such as the annoying progress bar differences between 2000 and XP, but .NET handles all that.

      I developed an application about 4 years ago that ran on .NET 1.1 on Windows 2000 PCs. When 2.0 came out and I switched to VS 2005, I upgraded the application and people then started running it on XP. Then when 3.5 came out and I switched to VS 2008, I upgraded it again.

      Those two upgrades took me from 1.1 to 3.5 without *any* code changes, therefore I hardly think you can call them backwards-incompatible. Of course you cannot develop an application on 3.5 and expect it to run on 1.1, that's the same with any language - PHP 4 and 5 for instance.

      It just shows how little you actually know about .NET. 3.5 actually runs the same core engine as 2.0. Microsoft purposely developed 3.5 so that the core was untouched, meaning 2.0 apps could happily be upgraded to 3.5 with no changes.

      All the extra bits that qualified 3.5 for a major release cycle (LINQ, Entity Framework, lambda functions etc) are part of newer versioned assemblies that run side-by-side with the 2.0 versions. You tell your apps which version you want them to run under and Visual Studio will see to it that they will.

      Don't get me wrong, I'm not a massive M$ fan, it just so happens I'm better trained with .NET than I am with FOSS stuff because more businesses prefer the "support" of M$. For instance I much prefer PHP over ASP.NET - that I will agree with you is hugely overcomplicated, but the MVC stuff in 3.5 looks like it may be a lot simpler, I haven't (and probably won't) develop any web stuff on Windows however.

      Now if M$ would put as much effort into making their MFC/C++ classes much easier to use I'd gladly switch - native apps provide so much better performance but take longer to develop. If I'm running code that depends on highly-customised memory management or need to run server-side, I'll go with C++ on *nix.

      As for Windows development with a focus on speed-to-market, you can't beat .NET.

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Happy

    This is why...

    ...I still use VB6.

  7. Chris 22
    Thumb Up

    Better late than slow

    Better to release a product late than buggy, really more people should do it.

  8. Adam Azarchs
    Thumb Down

    Disappointing

    Our team was really looking to switching over soon, to take advantage of some of the new features (parallel programming in particular). Plus, from what we've seen of beta 2, it's already way faster than 2008...

  9. Anonymous Coward
    FAIL

    Never mind performance ...

    I'll settle for one that doesn't crash every 5 minutesand lose all my bloody work!!!

    Have to agree about the comment of 'pure coding' or at least being able to turn off memory sapping unwanted crap. Apparently they haven't made a 64 bit VS as apparently (and I paraphrase here) they 'dont think VS would benefit from the additional available memory'. Ahem.

  10. Ocular Sinister
    Thumb Down

    Performance? Lets fix the crashes first!

    I was forced to upgrade to VS2010 a couple of weeks ago... I hoped I would be able to open a XAML or XML file without crashing the whole thing. Sadly, if anything the latest VS2010 is even less stable than 2008. OK, so its a beta, but this is pretty bad. And, yes, it takes up to a minute before it crashes, so I guess there are 'performance' issues. And on top of all that I can't get rid of the tabs (I'm a developer for fucks sake, I don't need or want a telly-tuby UI, I want as many lines of code on my screen as possible!). The one useful new feature - multi-monitor support - is badly thought out: Ctrl+Tab becomes useless as the damn 'full screen code window' has an always on top flag! Fail, fail, fail.

  11. kissingthecarpet
    Gates Horns

    Stability

    is something that needs sorting out as well. I really do not want to see another "Visual Studio needs to close" or whatever. Plus some of their other weird & scary bugs that result in you having to wipe the dev machine & reinstall everything because VS not only no longer compiles anything, but is also uninstallable, even when you've followed all their dodgy registry hacks.

    Its a real shame, because VS could be so much better if they addressed the real issues, rather than add new, probably unwanted, features

    Meanwhile, the MS apologists repeat their mantra of FLOSS bashing.

    O.T.comment - Some MS-worshipping wanker just convinced my elderly parents to buy another 2GB of memory for their XP machine that they use solely for Email & a little light web-surfing, because it was running slow and "Windows needs more memory after a year or two" (eh?) - The real reason - some adware style shit my sister had installed last time she visited. He only charged them £100+ for telling them about the memory they didn't need & jamming it in the slot(highly skilled job).

  12. WinHatter
    WTF?

    Stuck in time.

    Well I'm still with MSVC++ 6 & .NET 2005 (well 2003 SP1) and that is the last one I'll ever use ... so M$ can issue any kind of sluggish MSVC++ they want ... the plank's been walked for us.

  13. AndrueC Silver badge
    Pint

    But here's a fix for you...

    If your VS is unstable delete the .SUO files. These can get stupidly large and eventually VS will have memory issues.

    I had stability issues last year but once I found out about this workaround they stopped. I now delete .SUO files as part of a monthly maintenance cycle. It's a minor inconvenience losing some settings but it's better than a crashing environment.

  14. Anonymous Coward
    FAIL

    its about time

    Micro$oft started to release quality rather than quantity - but after the fista cockup of the last couple of years, they cannot afford to repeat those mistakes.

  15. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    It's going to be great

    I might buy an MSDN subs this year. VS2010 is going to be a milestone version, like v6.

  16. James Gibbons
    Linux

    Lean and mean C++ IDE

    Nokia's Qt Software built a complete IDE called Qt Creator in about a year. It's really fun to watch all 8 cores on an i7 run the command line cl and fly through builds. It isn't perfect and relies on a low level MS debugger, but otherwise is lean, mean and has plenty of useful features that can be easily configured to your liking. You can get it and the source code under LGPL.

    The trouble with MS is that they have too many legacy APIs to support and with everything added into VS 2010 to support no wonder it's slow. Not to mention that .NET has memory problems because of the way it handles virtual memory.

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