5 ms·

Just because everything else is worse, doesn't mean visual studio couldn't be better. I've been watching the development of this, here's their main points: It

Just because everything else is worse, doesn't mean visual studio couldn't be better. I've been watching the development of this, here's their main points: It's slow. Stepping through code and updating watches can take a few seconds. Which really does slow you down when you're doing a lot of work with it. It's ginormous, you shouldn't need a huge program with tons of dependencies to debug things. And finally, it's primitive. It usually works for what it does but it would be nice for a debugger to be more flexible and allow things like: Displaying blocks of memory as images, allowing custom display visualization, and navigation of your own data structures, or charting how a value changes over time. Debugger functionality has been pretty stagnant for at least a decade. Also plugging in project specific debugging tools like serialization and custom tools would be neat.

jboles 8y ago
For slowness when single-stepping, turning off Intellitrace (if not required) and playing with the function/expression evaluation and symbol loading settings in Tools->Options can help with that, if you haven’t already.
WalterGR 8y ago
It’s slow. Do you use ReSharper? It’s been a while since I used either ReSharper or Visual Studio, but I remember ReSharper being like lashing a half-ton Snap On tool chest to your car.
- mattnewport 8y ago
  Yeah, I had to turn ReSharper off despite liking some of its features as it brings my monster development PC to its knees and is basically unusable due to its abysmal performance. It makes vanilla Visual Studio seem svelte and responsive by comparison.
  - gmueckl 8y ago
    How big is the project you are working on? Resharper qas a net productivity gain for me on moderately complex projects (the lag was more than compensated by the speed gained from the mode powerful editing and refactoring, let alone the lower barrier to start otherwise tedious refactoring jobs)
    - mattnewport 8y ago
      It's not huge. It's a Unity project and it's a couple of years of development with a team that has grown from just me to 4 programmers in that time so it's a decent size but there are much bigger Unity projects out there I'm sure.
gmueckl 8y ago
Uhm... I get why you would want stuff like data visualizations on your debugger (I missed that enough times already), but which debugger has all of these features out of the box? Also, VS is much more extensible than people tend to give it credit for. So even if the advanced debugging features are not avaiable out of the box, you can add them. I am not a VS fan boy, but compared to the competition, there are some things where it is absolutely worth its money (in other cases, it isn't).
Too 8y ago
VS debugger supports custom display visualization already: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/debugger/create-custom-visualizers-of-data?view=vs-2017 https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/debugger/creat... If you think the watch is slow it's probably because one of the expressions you are trying to evaluate is slow (eg getters doing more computation behind the scenes than you think). If you just watch plain data it's blazing fast.

jboles 8y ago

For slowness when single-stepping, turning off Intellitrace (if not required) and playing with the function/expression evaluation and symbol loading settings in Tools->Options can help with that, if you haven’t already.

WalterGR 8y ago

It’s slow. Do you use ReSharper? It’s been a while since I used either ReSharper or Visual Studio, but I remember ReSharper being like lashing a half-ton Snap On tool chest to your car.

mattnewport 8y ago
Yeah, I had to turn ReSharper off despite liking some of its features as it brings my monster development PC to its knees and is basically unusable due to its abysmal performance. It makes vanilla Visual Studio seem svelte and responsive by comparison.
- gmueckl 8y ago
  How big is the project you are working on? Resharper qas a net productivity gain for me on moderately complex projects (the lag was more than compensated by the speed gained from the mode powerful editing and refactoring, let alone the lower barrier to start otherwise tedious refactoring jobs)
  - mattnewport 8y ago
    It's not huge. It's a Unity project and it's a couple of years of development with a team that has grown from just me to 4 programmers in that time so it's a decent size but there are much bigger Unity projects out there I'm sure.

gmueckl 8y ago

Uhm... I get why you would want stuff like data visualizations on your debugger (I missed that enough times already), but which debugger has all of these features out of the box? Also, VS is much more extensible than people tend to give it credit for. So even if the advanced debugging features are not avaiable out of the box, you can add them. I am not a VS fan boy, but compared to the competition, there are some things where it is absolutely worth its money (in other cases, it isn't).

Too 8y ago

VS debugger supports custom display visualization already: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/debugger/create-custom-visualizers-of-data?view=vs-2017 https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/debugger/creat... If you think the watch is slow it's probably because one of the expressions you are trying to evaluate is slow (eg getters doing more computation behind the scenes than you think). If you just watch plain data it's blazing fast.