7 ms·

Visual Studio is superb? It's still a 32-bit app that crashes in daily usage.

by njloof 11y ago

JBReefer 11y ago
I know there's a strong VS counterjerk, but nothing else comes close. I've been using it for years and all of its crashes have been 100% my fault. I know IntelliJ is great, and JetBrains in general rocks, but it's no contest.
- creshal 11y ago
  > all of its crashes have been 100% my fault. Wait, what? Why is it okay if a program crashes at all?
  - random_rr 11y ago
    ... can you show me a program you've written that accepts complex developer input and literally never crashes?
    - creshal 11y ago
      Microsoft shouldn't be held to the same quality standards as a hobby programmer.
      - random_rr 11y ago
        Okay, but what I'm saying is that you are holding them to an impossible standard. If you believe perfect programs exist, I've got news for you. Development environments in particular may have to crash sometimes in order to prevent the user from wrecking everything else on the system.
      - gelasio 11y ago
        OK then let's compare VS to XCode, which doesn't even have half the features of VS and crashes twice as much. If not, which comparable product would you pick?
  - JBReefer 11y ago
    Running tons and tons of VS instances while debugging broken, memory hogging programs, modifying the XML for weird project types for third party plugins poorly, etc. Things that MS really can't do anything about.
    - douche 11y ago
      I've never seen a GUI form builder that really worked that well, but the WinForms and especially WPF builders are huge dogs. Less said about the old-fashioned WebForms GUI, the better...
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- flurpitude 11y ago
  I would have agreed that it's a good product right up to Visual Studio 2013. But Visual Studio 2015 is slow, buggy and unstable. They really have screwed something up, it has been months, and the update pack they released didn't make any tangible improvements. Meanwhile the "extensions and updates" area just continues to push Microsoft products I don't need, and every now and then I am not allowed into the IDE because my license has "gone stale". Everyone in my team has daily crashes, bugs and slowdowns and it is hurting us. How can Microsoft not have found any of these issues during all their testing?
cptskippy 11y ago
In comparison to other IDEs it is superb. As far as the 64/32 bit argument, it's pretty absurd. What are the benefits of going 64 bit? More memory consumption? (http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ricom/archive/2015/12/29/revisiting-64-bit-ness-in-visual-studio-and-elsewhere.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ricom/archive/2015/12/29/revisiting-...) What types of apps are you developing in Visual Studio? It's my daily driver and crashes very rarely for me.
- reitanqild 11y ago
  > In comparison to other IDEs it is superb. I thought most serious users of VS had to install ReSharper on top of it?
  - cptskippy 11y ago
    I guess I'm not a serious user then because I've never used ReSharper anywhere I've worked.
  - Someone1234 11y ago
    Most "serious" users are now uninstalling ReSharper. Visual Studio 2015 adds most of ReSharper's key perks and JetBrains has done little or nothing to resolve ReSharper's laggy/hoggy/unstable code (and has said they aren't going to re-write it for Roslyn). Honestly back in VS 2010 I'd call ReSharper a core tool. In VS 2015, eww.
    - reitanqild 11y ago
      Thanks, appreciated. I honestly thought it still was like this.
  - WorldMaker 11y ago
    I've never liked ReSharper, have felt that the "advice" it offers is often over-rated and seems commonly to be wrong for C# (not unexpected given that JetBrains primarily focuses on Java outside of ReSharper, I feel like ReSharper is a Java developer's approach to C#). These days what's baked into VS and the Roslyn compiler platform blows ReSharper out of the water. Just about everyone I've worked with that had daily complaints about how slow and laggy they felt Visual Studio was didn't seem to understand that ReSharper was 99% of the slow-down, excessive memory use, and UX lag...
Digit-Al 11y ago
Not moving to 64 bit has been a pragmatic decision [1]. As for crashing, I used it for over 10 years at my previous company and it never crashed once. At my current company it only crashes when I am using the Stylevision plug-in, which is really, really, buggy. [1] http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ricom/archive/2009/06/10/visual-studio-why-is-there-no-64-bit-version.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ricom/archive/2009/06/10/visual-stud...
- criddell 11y ago
  That pragmatic decision was made 7 years ago. A lot has changed since then and I don't think the arguments hold up. What developer machine doesn't have at least 16 GB of RAM these days?
  - gelasio 11y ago
    Did you even read the article? The arguments still hold up. It's clearly the case that it's not worth the effort to move VS to 64-bit. - "First, from a performance perspective the pointers get larger, so data structures get larger, and the processor cache stays the same size. That basically results in a raw speed hit..." - "The cost of a full port [due to the amount of code involved, not the quality of the code] of that much native code is going to be quite high and of course all known extensions would break and we’d basically have to create a 64 bit ecosystem pretty much like you do for drivers. Ouch." - "A 64 bit address space for the process isn’t going to help you with page faults except in maybe indirect ways, and it will definitely hurt you in direct ways because your data is bigger...32 bit processes accrue all these benefits just as surely as 64 bit ones."
  - sblom 11y ago
    And they have current benchmarks that indicate that it's still the right decision: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ricom/archive/2015/12/29/revisiting-64-bit-ness-in-visual-studio-and-elsewhere.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ricom/archive/2015/12/29/revisiting-...
    - criddell 11y ago
jlhim 11y ago
i'm not sure what you are doing wrong. i use it 8 hours every day and this does not happen.
GnarfGnarf 11y ago
I've been using various versions of Visual Studio since 1999. I can count on one hand the number of times it has crashed, usually coincident with me doing something unwise.
- thought_alarm 11y ago
  Most things in VS run in-process (that was the case circa mid-2000s, at least). It only takes one bad component to bring the whole thing down, and there are many, many, many components.
Merad 11y ago
IME, Visual Studio crashes are almost always due to misbehaving plugins. I'm in it all day every day, and once or twice a week it will develop some quirk that requires a restart to fix, but I can't remember the last time it actually crashed. The only plugins I run are Resharper, Xamarin, and PTVS.
its2complicated 11y ago
I've never experienced VS crashing, but Intellisense stops working EVERY time I use VS! :)
chrisbennet 11y ago
Daily? VS2015 hasn't locked up on me in a couple of days. ;-) Even with locking up once or twice a week, it's pretty awesome.

Visual Studio is superb? It's still a 32-bit app that crashes in daily usage.

by njloof 11y ago

Visual Studio is superb? It's still a 32-bit app that crashes in daily usage.

I know there's a strong VS counterjerk, but nothing else comes close. I've been using it for years and all of its crashes have been 100% my fault. I know IntelliJ is great, and JetBrains in general rocks, but it's no contest.

creshal 11y ago
> all of its crashes have been 100% my fault. Wait, what? Why is it okay if a program crashes at all?
- random_rr 11y ago
  ... can you show me a program you've written that accepts complex developer input and literally never crashes?
  - creshal 11y ago
    Microsoft shouldn't be held to the same quality standards as a hobby programmer.
    - random_rr 11y ago
      Okay, but what I'm saying is that you are holding them to an impossible standard. If you believe perfect programs exist, I've got news for you. Development environments in particular may have to crash sometimes in order to prevent the user from wrecking everything else on the system.
    - gelasio 11y ago
      OK then let's compare VS to XCode, which doesn't even have half the features of VS and crashes twice as much. If not, which comparable product would you pick?
- JBReefer 11y ago
  Running tons and tons of VS instances while debugging broken, memory hogging programs, modifying the XML for weird project types for third party plugins poorly, etc. Things that MS really can't do anything about.
  - douche 11y ago
    I've never seen a GUI form builder that really worked that well, but the WinForms and especially WPF builders are huge dogs. Less said about the old-fashioned WebForms GUI, the better...
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
flurpitude 11y ago
I would have agreed that it's a good product right up to Visual Studio 2013. But Visual Studio 2015 is slow, buggy and unstable. They really have screwed something up, it has been months, and the update pack they released didn't make any tangible improvements. Meanwhile the "extensions and updates" area just continues to push Microsoft products I don't need, and every now and then I am not allowed into the IDE because my license has "gone stale". Everyone in my team has daily crashes, bugs and slowdowns and it is hurting us. How can Microsoft not have found any of these issues during all their testing?

cptskippy 11y ago

In comparison to other IDEs it is superb. As far as the 64/32 bit argument, it's pretty absurd. What are the benefits of going 64 bit? More memory consumption? (http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ricom/archive/2015/12/29/revisiting-64-bit-ness-in-visual-studio-and-elsewhere.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ricom/archive/2015/12/29/revisiting-...) What types of apps are you developing in Visual Studio? It's my daily driver and crashes very rarely for me.

reitanqild 11y ago
> In comparison to other IDEs it is superb. I thought most serious users of VS had to install ReSharper on top of it?
- cptskippy 11y ago
  I guess I'm not a serious user then because I've never used ReSharper anywhere I've worked.
- Someone1234 11y ago
  Most "serious" users are now uninstalling ReSharper. Visual Studio 2015 adds most of ReSharper's key perks and JetBrains has done little or nothing to resolve ReSharper's laggy/hoggy/unstable code (and has said they aren't going to re-write it for Roslyn). Honestly back in VS 2010 I'd call ReSharper a core tool. In VS 2015, eww.
  - reitanqild 11y ago
    Thanks, appreciated. I honestly thought it still was like this.
- WorldMaker 11y ago
  I've never liked ReSharper, have felt that the "advice" it offers is often over-rated and seems commonly to be wrong for C# (not unexpected given that JetBrains primarily focuses on Java outside of ReSharper, I feel like ReSharper is a Java developer's approach to C#). These days what's baked into VS and the Roslyn compiler platform blows ReSharper out of the water. Just about everyone I've worked with that had daily complaints about how slow and laggy they felt Visual Studio was didn't seem to understand that ReSharper was 99% of the slow-down, excessive memory use, and UX lag...

Digit-Al 11y ago

Not moving to 64 bit has been a pragmatic decision [1]. As for crashing, I used it for over 10 years at my previous company and it never crashed once. At my current company it only crashes when I am using the Stylevision plug-in, which is really, really, buggy. [1] http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ricom/archive/2009/06/10/visual-studio-why-is-there-no-64-bit-version.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ricom/archive/2009/06/10/visual-stud...

criddell 11y ago
That pragmatic decision was made 7 years ago. A lot has changed since then and I don't think the arguments hold up. What developer machine doesn't have at least 16 GB of RAM these days?
- gelasio 11y ago
  Did you even read the article? The arguments still hold up. It's clearly the case that it's not worth the effort to move VS to 64-bit. - "First, from a performance perspective the pointers get larger, so data structures get larger, and the processor cache stays the same size. That basically results in a raw speed hit..." - "The cost of a full port [due to the amount of code involved, not the quality of the code] of that much native code is going to be quite high and of course all known extensions would break and we’d basically have to create a 64 bit ecosystem pretty much like you do for drivers. Ouch." - "A 64 bit address space for the process isn’t going to help you with page faults except in maybe indirect ways, and it will definitely hurt you in direct ways because your data is bigger...32 bit processes accrue all these benefits just as surely as 64 bit ones."
- sblom 11y ago
  And they have current benchmarks that indicate that it's still the right decision: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ricom/archive/2015/12/29/revisiting-64-bit-ness-in-visual-studio-and-elsewhere.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ricom/archive/2015/12/29/revisiting-...
  - criddell 11y ago

jlhim 11y ago

i'm not sure what you are doing wrong. i use it 8 hours every day and this does not happen.

GnarfGnarf 11y ago

I've been using various versions of Visual Studio since 1999. I can count on one hand the number of times it has crashed, usually coincident with me doing something unwise.

thought_alarm 11y ago
Most things in VS run in-process (that was the case circa mid-2000s, at least). It only takes one bad component to bring the whole thing down, and there are many, many, many components.

Merad 11y ago

IME, Visual Studio crashes are almost always due to misbehaving plugins. I'm in it all day every day, and once or twice a week it will develop some quirk that requires a restart to fix, but I can't remember the last time it actually crashed. The only plugins I run are Resharper, Xamarin, and PTVS.

its2complicated 11y ago

I've never experienced VS crashing, but Intellisense stops working EVERY time I use VS! :)

chrisbennet 11y ago

Daily? VS2015 hasn't locked up on me in a couple of days. ;-) Even with locking up once or twice a week, it's pretty awesome.