The Annoying Things About Visual Studio

As I work with VS, day in and day out, there are certain things that just annoy and frustrate me.  I will share them so the zero people who read this blog might have a snicker.

In General

1. If you have an older app, say one that uses .net Framework 4.5.1, and you try to edit it on a machine that has a newer version, you CAN'T.  There is no way to install an older version of the framework alongside the newer version so you don't have to check 800 user machines for a framework update.
2. Intellisense just quits 3 or 4 times a day without reason or warning.
3. Editing a function name from the default (something like button1OnClick) to a real name (like LoadData) causes the designer to barf horribly,
4. In Entity Framework, there are many objects that are created, named, and maintained by the framework.  Now and then you'll see an error message that some object you NEVER CREATED, DON'T KNOW ABOUT, and CAN'T EDIT has failed.
5. The error messages most often have nothing to do with the problem, are too cryptic, and have a link to generic (useless) answers on the msdn site.

Desktop Apps

1. When you are debugging, and you pooch the password, you get a massive error message, something about not being able to load System.Sql.Dll.
2. In datagridview, CellChanged fires off for every cell while you are loading the data initially - and even when the column headers are being drawn, not just as you'd expect, when the data is - you know - changed.
3. Now and then a form will get changed by the IDE in such a way that it will not compile.  This can happen even if you have not opened or edited the form.
4. They took away built in installer building, and force you to use cryptic and dysfunctional third party installers to build your projects - unless you want to put all your clients stuff on their stupid, insecure "cloud".

Web Sites

1. in MVC, there is no solid linkage between things.  A dropdown on a page named Customers will automatically find a list named Customers if there is one in the ViewBag.  This means the code looks like there is no list associated with the dropdown, you just have to know that if anything fills this list, it is used automatically, just because it's named the same.
2. In an asp.net build, sometimes you need to build/deploy the dll's and sometimes you can just copy up the .cs files, presumably the webserver compiles for you.  I have no idea when one is required and when the other is.
3. Also, isn't having a compiler in your webserver really dangerous?
4. There is a script that will create the necessary tables for login, but there is no easy way to figure out how to force it to use SQL server instead of the default Access mdf database.

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Bryan Valencia is a contributing editor and founder of Visual Studio Journey.  He owns and operates Software Services, a web design and hosting company in Manteca, California.