4 ms·

I have been an SDET on VS2010. The real problem with VS in the past few years as it has move away from native. Everything is managed managed managed! We have le

I have been an SDET on VS2010. The real problem with VS in the past few years as it has move away from native. Everything is managed managed managed! We have left internal (Office) and external (lots and lots of folks) customers in the dust by only building decent managed tools. That's my opinion. What I really wanted to address was performance. There was indeed a huge push after Beta2 to improve perf. At the end of the day 2010 is still slower than 2008 and eats up more memory. I guess that's an accomplishment if sucking less is considered good. But will people upgrade? I don't know. Hopefully because that's good for me. But I am pessimistic and currently looking for other employment as the experience was that bad. Why was it so bad? Well I feel most of the pain points could have been avoided. Management ignored a lot of the performance/memory issues last summer and had an attitude of ship ship ship with NO regard for quality. I was responsible for reporting an overall grade for the areas I tested. I reported them to be poor and fair. I also listed all the known bugs in those areas. Management boosted the rating to good on the basis that memory and performance bugs don't count. Let me reemphasize that last point: I was told memory and performance bugs DID NOT count towards the overall quality rating of the product. This was management's attitude through most of the product cycle. We could never give an honest assessment of the product because they would challenge it and argue that it wasn't that bad. I believe their reason was simple for doing this. They need to take the data to their managers and up the chain of command to paint a pretty picture of how great the product is. Even if that's an illusion. Basically telling the truth of product quality is punished. If I lied about quality managers would be ecstatic about how a great a job we did. If I told the truth about quality instead of thanking me for figuring out where customer pain points might be the attitude was ALWAYS this should have been found earlier. The problem is many times I did find it earlier and they did their best to bury it before the next meeting they were heading off too report product quality. I will say this. IntelliSense is much better for C++. Even though other native tools might suck. IntelliSense teams seems to be doing a pretty good job. It has always has been my favorite VS feature.

city41 17y ago
It's interesting you report such disdain with the product. I will admit I was a SQL employee working on a component that was shipping in VS2010 (there's a handful of teams that did this, Entity Framework being one of them, although I wasn't actually on the EF team, they are a pretty visible example). My team really grew to dislike DevDiv and their practices quite a bit in a lot of regards (however, in other areas I enjoyed DevDiv a lot). To be totally blunt, SQL has their shit together a lot better than DevDiv does. And to be perfectly blunt again, it was the thought of doing this all over again for Dev11 that was a major motivator in me wanting to leave MS. And is 2010 worth the upgrade for most people? Hard to say. There's nothing in it that is truly mind blowing or "must have", it just iterates and improves a ton of stuff. I don't think .NET 4 alone is a compelling enough reason, most will remain happy with 2/3/3.5 for the time being. With all that said, I still stand behind VS2010. I think it still came together well. I really do hope I get to use it as my day to day environment, I like it that much more than 2008. I'm actually impressed how well it emerged out of the chaos that is DevDiv :) And yes, MS has dropped the ball on native dev quite a bit. It's definitely an afterthought. But most people who are looking to get 2010 are very much in the managed camp.
- unhappyms 17y ago
  I'll admit some of the disdain is related to the process with no consideration for the the actual product itself. The taste in my mouth after Dev10 makes me unhappy and my desire to leave MS seems to align with yours: "all over again for Dev11." Good luck in your future endeavorer.
  - city41 16y ago
    Yeah and good luck to you too. I can sure relate to your position. Although I'm sure the two of us were on totally different sides of a very large mountain :)
deleted 17y ago
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mrkurt 17y ago
> Everything is managed managed managed! We have left internal (Office) and external (lots and lots of folks) customers in the dust by only building decent managed tools. That's my opinion. Good! Well, good for internal I mean. If managed/WPF/etc are the future of Windows, then MS needs to start eating their own dog food and using those techs for their apps. It drives me utterly nuts to think of all the neat tools that show up in Windows that other MS divisions flat out ignore.
- unhappyms 17y ago
  DevDiv makes about $1 billion for MS. Office on the other hand makes about $18 billion. So in terms of politics Office gets to decide what tools they use for the most part. Office sees it as a risk in terms of profit and hitting ship dates on time to switch to the latest stuff DevDiv is spitting out. Rumor has it WPF is going the way of Windows Forms. It will be supported but no new features. With that in mind, think of all the UI frameworks MS has had wrapping up Win32: MFC, ATL/WTL, WinForms, WPF. Nothing seems to stick. Office just writes their own stuff that they KNOW they can depend on it being there. Duplication sure. But DevDiv is notorious for releasing things and deprecating the past "great" technology within a few years. There is another reason they ignore the new tools: managed is slow for the client. For the server world managed is great and has won. Nobody in their right mind would write native web apps. They write the stuff that needs to be native (db, webserver) then glue the app together with python, ruby, C#, or Java (I know, a vast oversimplification of webapps). Clients don't have the advantage of the webapps. We don't have a lot of computer to do things in parallel. Every millisecond counts to make the app appear as responsive as possible. Why does managed suck for the client? JITing is slow and the code it generates isn't nearly as good as a compiler. NGENing is possible but still slow because of garbage collection and marshaling data between native and managed code. Little things like that add up and slow down responsiveness a lot on the UI side of things and that is what the user notices and complains about.

city41 17y ago

It's interesting you report such disdain with the product. I will admit I was a SQL employee working on a component that was shipping in VS2010 (there's a handful of teams that did this, Entity Framework being one of them, although I wasn't actually on the EF team, they are a pretty visible example). My team really grew to dislike DevDiv and their practices quite a bit in a lot of regards (however, in other areas I enjoyed DevDiv a lot). To be totally blunt, SQL has their shit together a lot better than DevDiv does. And to be perfectly blunt again, it was the thought of doing this all over again for Dev11 that was a major motivator in me wanting to leave MS. And is 2010 worth the upgrade for most people? Hard to say. There's nothing in it that is truly mind blowing or "must have", it just iterates and improves a ton of stuff. I don't think .NET 4 alone is a compelling enough reason, most will remain happy with 2/3/3.5 for the time being. With all that said, I still stand behind VS2010. I think it still came together well. I really do hope I get to use it as my day to day environment, I like it that much more than 2008. I'm actually impressed how well it emerged out of the chaos that is DevDiv :) And yes, MS has dropped the ball on native dev quite a bit. It's definitely an afterthought. But most people who are looking to get 2010 are very much in the managed camp.

unhappyms 17y ago
I'll admit some of the disdain is related to the process with no consideration for the the actual product itself. The taste in my mouth after Dev10 makes me unhappy and my desire to leave MS seems to align with yours: "all over again for Dev11." Good luck in your future endeavorer.
- city41 16y ago
  Yeah and good luck to you too. I can sure relate to your position. Although I'm sure the two of us were on totally different sides of a very large mountain :)

deleted 17y ago

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mrkurt 17y ago

> Everything is managed managed managed! We have left internal (Office) and external (lots and lots of folks) customers in the dust by only building decent managed tools. That's my opinion. Good! Well, good for internal I mean. If managed/WPF/etc are the future of Windows, then MS needs to start eating their own dog food and using those techs for their apps. It drives me utterly nuts to think of all the neat tools that show up in Windows that other MS divisions flat out ignore.

unhappyms 17y ago
DevDiv makes about $1 billion for MS. Office on the other hand makes about $18 billion. So in terms of politics Office gets to decide what tools they use for the most part. Office sees it as a risk in terms of profit and hitting ship dates on time to switch to the latest stuff DevDiv is spitting out. Rumor has it WPF is going the way of Windows Forms. It will be supported but no new features. With that in mind, think of all the UI frameworks MS has had wrapping up Win32: MFC, ATL/WTL, WinForms, WPF. Nothing seems to stick. Office just writes their own stuff that they KNOW they can depend on it being there. Duplication sure. But DevDiv is notorious for releasing things and deprecating the past "great" technology within a few years. There is another reason they ignore the new tools: managed is slow for the client. For the server world managed is great and has won. Nobody in their right mind would write native web apps. They write the stuff that needs to be native (db, webserver) then glue the app together with python, ruby, C#, or Java (I know, a vast oversimplification of webapps). Clients don't have the advantage of the webapps. We don't have a lot of computer to do things in parallel. Every millisecond counts to make the app appear as responsive as possible. Why does managed suck for the client? JITing is slow and the code it generates isn't nearly as good as a compiler. NGENing is possible but still slow because of garbage collection and marshaling data between native and managed code. Little things like that add up and slow down responsiveness a lot on the UI side of things and that is what the user notices and complains about.