MICROSOFT -- I AM SERIOUSLY FRUSTRATED WITH YOUR BUGGY DESIGNER

B

billym

I don't get it. You hire the best of the best. You've been doing Windows
applications for YEARS... and yet your VS designer is BUG PRONE BEYOND
BELIEF. Almost to the point of being unusable.

I have put in bug reports and recieved hot fixes... and STILL dealing with
problems related to your layout designer having an F-ing mind of its own.

Most recently, it has been with the Tablet PC. I spend a great deal of time
laying out forms and attaching code to handle them, only to have entire
groups of controls disappear entirly or resize themselves for NO APPARENT
REASON.

I give specific dimensions, and they render completly differently on one
machine vs. another.

To be honest, this is really getting old. How do I explain to my clients
that I'm late because simple last minute changes unrelated to layout TRASHED
MY LAYOUTS and I'm spending time trying to recover?

What in God's Green Earth is the PROBLEM????
 
T

Tim Anderson

billym said:
I don't get it. You hire the best of the best. You've been doing Windows
applications for YEARS... and yet your VS designer is BUG PRONE BEYOND
BELIEF. Almost to the point of being unusable.
Click to expand...

I'm not sure if you're looking for help or just having a rant, but just in
case...

First, I've not found the VS.Net form designer (if that's the designer you
mean, you don't say) especially buggy. In most circumstances it is stable
here. Having said that, there are a few habits I've developed to avoid
problems:

1. User controls or any custom controls. VS.Net can have problems when you
modify a user control that is open in the form designer, perhaps in an other
project (I have multi-project solutions). I recommend closing such forms
before working on the user control (Window -> Close all documents is a
useful menu option). Then rebuild the solution before re-opening the forms.

2. Switching between debug and release. I find VS.Net doesn't cope well
with this, especially in VB.Net which uses a single bin output folder for
both debug and release builds. I make the switch, exit VS.Net and then
reopen it.

I think you will see improvements in VS.Net 2005 which has a new build
engine.

Tim
Tech writing:
http://www.itwriting.com
 
M

md

That's what MS always says. The next version will fix all the problems. And
for several hundred dollars you can have these fixes. The only thing is, the
new version may fix some of the "features" of the current product, but then
it adds more bugs. Which will be fixed in the next version... Which costs a
couple hundred dollars... which contains more bugs... which will be fixed in
the next version... etc, etc...
 
B

billym

Actually, this problem is most likely an artifact that tends to show up in
the designer.

However, I HAVE submitted bug reports on it in the past and it WAS a bug for
which I received a hotfix to the .NET framework. All was well until I
started a Tablet PC project only to discover this maddening problem is back.

What makes this so frustrating is a combination of aggressively tight
deadlines and having to spend such an inordinate amount of time dealing with
this issue.

Look, when I lay out a form designed for a 1024x768 screen I want it to stay
that way irregardless of what machine I'm running on as long as they have a
minimum resolution of 1024x768.

As it stands, it's a crapshoot... with controls disapparing entirely or
suddenly rending outside the border of the form, etc. Controls bound to a
DataSet will also lose track of the DataSet.

This strikes me as something that should be getting extremely high priority
at Microsoft insofar as they have a strategic interest in the success of
WinForms.
 
T

Tim Anderson

billym said:
Actually, this problem is most likely an artifact that tends to show up in
the designer.
Click to expand...

Not sure what you mean by this?
As it stands, it's a crapshoot... with controls disapparing entirely or
suddenly rending outside the border of the form, etc. Controls bound to a
DataSet will also lose track of the DataSet.
Click to expand...

I've not had problems like this, other than those that I mentioned; it does
sound frustrating.

Tim
Tech writing:
http://www.itwriting.com
 
B

billym

Here is another mystery... the problem that totally ticked me off last night
fixed itself this morning. Controls have returned to their correct placement
and no longer rendering outside the form borders. I have done nothing
between last night and this AM... just fired up the app to get some more
screenshots and the problem was no longer there. (I do have screenshots from
last evening that clearly show the problem.)

This is a strong indicator that there is buggy behavior in the .NET
framework rendering engine.
 
B

billym

Tim Anderson said:
Not sure what you mean by this?
Click to expand...

When similar problems first started appearing in the designer where controls
were being resized, relocated, or dropped in the designer when a form was
saved, Microsoft identified the problem as a bug in the .NET framework (1.1)
they thought they had fixed in 1.0 (I sent them sample projects and they
were able to recreate the problem). They sent me a hotfix for it and I have
not had a problem until now. (I never really did understand why the designer
checks/modifies the layout when a form is being saved as long as it is fine
in the designer.)

However, it appears to have returned in a similar way on the Tablet PC. Last
week, minutes before I was scheduled to show the UI to my internal
customers, I made a minor change that had nothing to do with layout, only to
discover to my horror that most of the controls on ALL of my tab pages
disappeared and were no longer in the Designer Generated code.

It was too late to recover them and I had to resort to presenting them with
screenshots I had taken earlier.

Needless to say, I was not a happy camper insofar as this was embarassing;
which is why I was especially frustrated last night when another similar
anomoly in the form rendering cropped up. (Group boxes, etc. were rendering
beyond the form border and, worse, beyond the SCREEN border -- even when the
app was maximized. There were no scroll bars and the data entry controls
simply could not be accessed as a result.)

This is simply unacceptable and I do hope that Microsoft elevates it to the
highest priority.
 
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