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Welcome to Visual Studio, the home of updates that take hours to install and sometimes end up bricking your IDE. To be fair, that hasn't happened in a pretty l

Welcome to Visual Studio, the home of updates that take hours to install and sometimes end up bricking your IDE. To be fair, that hasn't happened in a pretty long time for me - but in the earlier days it was commonplace. It used to be bleeding edge features that would do it, other times it was just because they took so long, that interrupting the process of upgrading or installing caused a mess. Or installing the newest version alongside the older version, etc. Visual Studio is a massive and complex creature (much like other "big IDEs", such as Eclipse) - although it has become much more streamlined in more recent releases - considering how complex it is. EDIT: To be clear, problems often involved corruption of registry values, library/DLL hell, small database or configuration files and caches, etc. that happened with Visual Studio in the scenarios above.

koyote 6y ago
Yeah I have been using VS for nearly a decade now but I've never 'bricked' it. Sure, sometimes installing new versions alongside old versions could cause issues. But that's a managed process that one team member would do before the whole team migrated and any issues would be worked out during that stage. (one of our old upgrade steps was to install 2015 before 2013 because doing it the other way around would break something in 2013; 2013 still being needed for some projects). I have never been in the situation where the entire company (or even entire team) was locked out of their IDE.
ironman1478 6y ago
Just to back this up, I've also bricked my VS installation multiple times when I worked in that environment. However, some of that was self inflicted when I was trying to figure out how to restore older sub versions of vs 2019 before they started publishing the manifests publicly. Also, while this isn't bricking the IDE, you can definitely ruin solutions & project files in a very hard to debug way if you ever need to manually update those files.
pixl97 6y ago
* click * Restores operating system image in a few minutes.
sixdimensional 6y ago
I've been using it since Visual Studio .NET 2003.. so we as developers didn't all have virtual machines, image-based backups or things like Docker/Vagrant back in late 2003/early 2004. Yes, since the inception of these kinds of tools, recovery from these corruptions became easier by restoring from an image. Still, in the early days, you could burn a lot of time doing anything of these things!

koyote 6y ago

Yeah I have been using VS for nearly a decade now but I've never 'bricked' it. Sure, sometimes installing new versions alongside old versions could cause issues. But that's a managed process that one team member would do before the whole team migrated and any issues would be worked out during that stage. (one of our old upgrade steps was to install 2015 before 2013 because doing it the other way around would break something in 2013; 2013 still being needed for some projects). I have never been in the situation where the entire company (or even entire team) was locked out of their IDE.

ironman1478 6y ago

Just to back this up, I've also bricked my VS installation multiple times when I worked in that environment. However, some of that was self inflicted when I was trying to figure out how to restore older sub versions of vs 2019 before they started publishing the manifests publicly. Also, while this isn't bricking the IDE, you can definitely ruin solutions & project files in a very hard to debug way if you ever need to manually update those files.

pixl97 6y ago

* click * Restores operating system image in a few minutes.

sixdimensional 6y ago

I've been using it since Visual Studio .NET 2003.. so we as developers didn't all have virtual machines, image-based backups or things like Docker/Vagrant back in late 2003/early 2004. Yes, since the inception of these kinds of tools, recovery from these corruptions became easier by restoring from an image. Still, in the early days, you could burn a lot of time doing anything of these things!