Underwhelm by VS2005

[CMM]

Let me preface by saying that I like VS2005. It improves on many things
lacking in VS 2003 and takes pretty much nothing away. Having said that, I
am a little underwhelmed by it.

Despite a couple of some new controls, there is still a dearth of quality
controls to build even a rudimentary "Windows" app. For instance, MDI is a
technology that was deemed passe in 1995 by Microsoft itself (11 years
ago!!!)... yet we have to build tons of code or resort to a third party
solution to get some sort of decent tabbed SDI/MDI Window management (where
MDI Children appear as tabs) solution like that found in the Visual Studio
IDE itself or apps like FrontPage, FireFox, etc. Why is this? Isn't it about
time for heaven's sake?

Although the Dataset now contains *some* neat improvements, I can't fathom
the rationale for some of the stuff Microsoft spent time on. The whole great
thing about Datasets is that they were completely decoupled from a
"database" and only tied together using a discrete (and optional)
DataAdapter (together with it's extremely useful TableMappings feature).
What we should have gotten in VS 2005 was a better more pretty wysiwig (drag
and drop) editor for mapping db columns to Dataset elements. Instead we get
the rather useless TableAdapter feature that blows many ideas of physical
separation of layers out of the water (in remoted physically n-tiered
distributed apps at least). I mean, it doesn't even really support
transactions (without kludging). In time, I think this "new" feature will
prove as useless as the CommandBuilder.

Why can't MSDN be installed and run from a network share? (It can't even be
run from the disc) That seems ridiculous to me. Also, the "Online" MSDN
integration is gee-whiz neat... but kinda useless because it lacks an Index
and browsable Contents.

Lots of other things just seem like change for the sake of change... for
instance:

Why move the "View Code"/"View Designer" buttons in the Solution
Explorer?... and with no option to move it back to where it used to be! This
button had been in that exact location for the last 10+ years (in old VB at
least)... what was the point of moving it now? Every time I (reflexively)
click where it used to be, I get the "Properties" window. Why?!!!! In fact,
"Properties" is something that after years of experience is intiuitevly
associated with the right-click context menu. The whole idea of that button
being on the bar is dubious let alone it being the FIRST button on the bar.

 

[Cor Ligthert [MVP]]

CMM,

When I started to read your message I got the idea, CMM will be reach with
what he can make as additions to Visual Studio.

However be aware that there is no guarantee that the behaviour as it is now
will stay the same, Rome was not build in one day.

In addition to the last, I thought how does CMM want to introduce new
things for users, even the slightest change in th place of a button is for
him/her difficult to accept.

Just my thought,

Cor

 

[Herfried K. Wagner [MVP]]

However be aware that there is no guarantee that the behaviour as it is
now will stay the same, Rome was not build in one day.

Well, if behavior changes too often it's like building houses on sand. It's
better to look for a more stable base for building the house.

 

[CMM]

I don't really want the "place of a button" that I have been using for what
seems like the last 10 years to change without at least having the ability
to put it back to where it was. It's like putting the button for the Lobby
in my elevator all the way at the top.

It might seem like a minor issue... but, really it's just an indication of a
"downhill" decline of an application. While VS 2002 and 2003 seem to have
been developed with a reverence for the IDE's of years past (and an
improvement on them), the loock and feel of VS 2005 seems to have been done
using the multitude of horrible Java IDE's as a template (complete with non
standard and ugly toolbox tabs that seem to have been developed by a junior
programmer instead of a GUI graphics expert).

 

[scorpion53061]

I think this is a huge step forward in relation to how we handle data.
I am not familiar wiht everything yet and had a couple false steps
yesterday. But I am loving how SQL and VS work together. This
datagridview control is very awesome. Kudos to the development team(s)
that worked on this project.

You always have the option of coding your own controls. So what if you
have to write some code. For many of us, that is the fun part (yeah I
know we got to curtail that instinct). In some respects MS is making it
to easy on us. But I do appreciate the efforts.

The MSDN and the button issue is .....not to be rude but would you like
some cheese with that wine? I am just kidding of course but cmon you
will adjust in time.

If there is one issue I have I have been hearing rumblings that the
life cycle of this product will only go into late 2006. Then we will
need another VS to deal with Vista. That is what I am reading that is
all.

Thanks for letting me say my piece.

 

[Herfried K. Wagner [MVP]]

Why move the "View Code"/"View Designer" buttons in the Solution
Explorer?...

That's not the only issue with this buttons. In the German .NET groups
there is currently a discussion going on where people report that these
buttons do not even always work as they should.

 

[Cor Ligthert [MVP]]

Herfried,

Well, if behavior changes too often it's like building houses on sand.
It's better to look for a more stable base for building the house.

Are you sure about what you write, Amsterdam is an old city. However as long
not as old as Rome. AFAIK is Rome build on sand (seven hills). A pity is
that Amsterdam is build on a swamp.

It has wooden pillars until the sand, however building very high buildings
is not as easy as in most places of the world.

It is of course not as Austria where a lot of buildings are build on rocks.
Although I am not sure of that is as well for citys build on the border of
the Donau.



Cor

 

[Cowboy \(Gregory A. Beamer\)]

Many of the UI changes were made from focus groups, primarily watching how
people work with the product. I do not agree with some, but it is likely
that it is familiarity that dictates my dislike, not that one idea is any
better or worse. The next version of Office will be a greater shock to many
people's system.

The entire thrust of Visual Studio is more drag and drop, less code. While
this sounds bad, at first, it frees up developers to spend time solving the
problem rather than coding the solution. This should, in theory, both speed
development and create higher quality software. I dislike it, myself, but I
am slowly having a change of heart as I learn to start using the
productivity bits on the lower tiers; it is actually kind of cool.

I am still not fond of wrapping the entire data access in a single object,
as it leads to a solution where business and data layers are tightly
coupled, if not contained, in the UI. Great for prototypes, but I am not
sure I will ever like the DataSource objects. But, they do have a niche out
there.

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

***********************************************
Think Outside the Box!
***********************************************

 

[Kevin Spencer]

!!!)... yet we have to build tons of code or resort to a third party

solution to get some sort of decent tabbed SDI/MDI Window management

Sometimes knowing where to find the information you need helps. See:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/vbcon/html/vbconMDIApplications.asp

What we should have gotten in VS 2005 was a better more pretty wysiwig
(drag and drop) editor for mapping db columns to Dataset elements. Instead
we get the rather useless TableAdapter feature that blows many ideas of
physical separation of layers out of the water (in remoted physically
n-tiered distributed apps at least). I mean, it doesn't even really
support transactions (without kludging). In time, I think this "new"
feature will prove as useless as the CommandBuilder.

This sort of GUI tool (that is, a GUI tool for developing business
components) is primarily for beginners. Advanced users may make use of it,
but what you refer to as "kludging" is simply the process of tweaking
auto-generated code for specific purposes. When an advanced user uses such a
tool (and I know of very few that do, in the case of GUI tools for
developing business components), they only expect a starting point for their
coding, a "jump-start" if you will

Beginners will use the heck out of these, which results in very poorly
optimized code. As Microsoft is well aware that beginners don't know much
about logical separation of tiers, transactions, et al, they designed the
GUI tools to prevent as many possible errors that beginning-level developers
might cause by such ignorant usage. Thus, yes, it is not pretty straight out
of the box. But again, an advanced user will generally write his/her own
business and/or data layer, optimize his/her code, and use GUI tools for the
sort of things that they are best for, which is creating Graphic User
Interface components. Even then, an advanced developer will not simply
accept the machine-generated code, but will tweak it manually afterwards.

Why can't MSDN be installed and run from a network share? (It can't even
be run from the disc) That seems ridiculous to me.

I don't know that "ridiculous" is a good characterization of this. It is a
feature that does not exist. Admittedly, it may be useful to some to have.
The absence may be due to licensing issues, but I doubt it. I would suggest
making a suggestion to add this feature to Microsoft.

Also, the "Online" MSDN integration is gee-whiz neat... but kinda useless
because it lacks an Index and browsable Contents.

An index and browsable contents for an Internet search engine? I wonder why
Google hasn't thought of that...

Why move the "View Code"/"View Designer" buttons in the Solution
Explorer?... and with no option to move it back to where it used to be!

This is another "feature design" issue. That is, it is not about something
that "should" or "should not" exist; it is a matter of personal preference.
I must admit I don't know the reasons that this was changed. However, again,
you may always make a suggestion about this feature to Microsoft. They do
pay attention.

--
HTH,

Kevin Spencer
Microsoft MVP
..Net Developer
If you push something hard enough,
it will fall over.
- Fudd's First Law of Opposition

 

[Carlos J. Quintero [VB MVP]]

there is currently a discussion going on where people report that these

buttons do not even always work as they should.

I think that I have seen that from time to time, the View Code button not
working (or maybe it was the View Designer button) and you have to use the
context menu. Is that what they are discussing?

--

Best regards,

Carlos J. Quintero

MZ-Tools: Productivity add-ins for Visual Studio .NET, VB6, VB5 and VBA
You can code, design and document much faster.
Free resources for add-in developers:
http://www.mztools.com

 

[Cor Ligthert [MVP]]

Cmm,

I don't really want the "place of a button" that I have been using for what
seems like the last 10 years to change without at least having the ability
to put it back to where it was. It's like putting the button for the Lobby
in my elevator all the way at the top.

It might seem like a minor issue... but, really it's just an indication of
a "downhill" decline of an application. While VS 2002 and 2003 seem to
have been developed with a reverence for the IDE's of years past (and an
improvement on them), the loock and feel of VS 2005 seems to have been
done using the multitude of horrible Java IDE's as a template (complete
with non standard and ugly toolbox tabs that seem to have been developed
by a junior programmer instead of a GUI graphics expert).

That is why I wrote about Rome, there is not every building more in Rome
that has exist.

Some of the bad ones are gone and some of the good ones are gone.

However the good constructive or designed ones (I don't mean the reason for
use), have stayed much longer than the bad ones.

They bad onces (see my sentence before) where not build with as reason to
build a bad constructive or designed building.

Cor

 

[Herfried K. Wagner [MVP]]

I think that I have seen that from time to time, the View Code button not
working (or maybe it was the View Designer button) and you have to use the
context menu. Is that what they are discussing?

Yes.

 

[Ross Presser]

In time, I think this "new" feature will
prove as useless as the CommandBuilder.

CommandBuilder useless? I think not. I have several apps that use it to
transform a dynamically built SELECT statement into the appropriate INSERT
or UPDATE statement ... saved me a lot of code writing.

True, dynamically built SQL isn't usually a good thing, as Joe Celko would
say, er, pound into my head with a nailgun, if he read this group.

 

[TT \(Tom Tempelaere\)]

Hi Scorpion,

I think this is a huge step forward in relation to how we handle data.
I am not familiar wiht everything yet and had a couple false steps
yesterday. But I am loving how SQL and VS work together. This
datagridview control is very awesome. Kudos to the development team(s)
that worked on this project.

You always have the option of coding your own controls. So what if you
have to write some code. For many of us, that is the fun part (yeah I
know we got to curtail that instinct). In some respects MS is making it
to easy on us. But I do appreciate the efforts.

What controls do you mean? I can code my own controls now, without VS7.1.

The MSDN and the button issue is .....not to be rude but would you like
some cheese with that wine? I am just kidding of course but cmon you
will adjust in time.

I have got to admit that I still miss some things from VS6 and I'm already
coding .NET for about two years now. These things bug you and keep doing it
because they seem like a step backward and not forward.

One of the thing that bugs me for instance is that when you specify a
handler for an event of a UI control that the focus changes to the code
file. Horrible. Perhaps there is a setting that disables this behaviour, but
I haven't found it (yet ) in VS7.1.

I must say that other things are better than before.

Kind regards,

 

[TT \(Tom Tempelaere\)]

Eeek,

What controls do you mean? I can code my own controls now, without VS7.1.

s/without/with

TT

 

[CMM]

Sometimes knowing where to find the information you need helps. See:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/vbcon/html/vbconMDIApplications.asp

Um, I know how to create MDI apps. I also know why they're discouraged and
deprecated. I was referring to the lack of a good Tabbed MDI (...or TDI if
you will... though some would mistakenly refer to them as SDI)
implementation from Microsoft for years now. I totally expected VS 2005 to
address this.

Visual Studio itself: TDI
FireFox: TDI
Internet Explorer: SDI
Word: SDI
Excel: MDI (that very badly mimics an SDI interface)

 

[CMM]

I know I was nitpicking... I love VS.... I just don't see the great leap
forward that everyone expected... the hype, I mean. We still don't have a
good pure Remoting infrastructure (c'mon a prebuilt Template at least!) that
doesn't rely on IIS or DCOM (I know, I know, wait for Vista). We finally get
real XP Themed capable controls (why did it take 4 years???). But, we still
can't create a solid Windows app without 3rd party controls.

I mean... for sheesh-sake... masked edit control just made their appearance.
Ooooh. Ahhh. These guys have been around since Windows 3.1.

I guess that's what the 3rd party market is for... I guess. Though some
things just seem to me to be so rudimentary that they should be available
out-the-box. Fancy spreadsheet-Excel-grids... sure, good candidate for a 3rd
party control. Masked edit box... no way!

 

[scorpion53061]

Joe Celko...now there's a guy who scared me into learning how to do
things right!! . But of course he was right.

Kelly

 

[CMM]

The MSDN and the button issue is .....not to be rude but would you like
some cheese with that wine? I am just kidding of course but cmon you
will adjust in time.

I'm not lamentating that the feature hasn't been implemented... I'm
complaining that it was taken away. Every few months when a new MSDN Library
is released, we will now have to install a 2-3gb help system on EACH of our
developer's machines (a 15 to 20 minute process on EACH machine) when before
we could just install it on a central fileserver and just install the
minimal interface on the developer's machine (a 10 second process on each
machine).

Also, this has nothing to do with "Licensing" as the MSDN *Library* has been
sharable in an entire organization with just one subscription for many years
now.

 

[CMM]

OK... maybe it's not entirely useless. I can see where it might come in
handy sometimes. If the DataAdapter code generator is like the Windows
shutdown button, then the CommandBuilder is like the hardwired power button
(rude-shutdown) on your computer. Sure, you might need it sometimes, but
only when the circumstances are dire.
Now there's an anology! ;-)