Overooped

Reasons why Visual Studio Sucks #3: Hard-to-overview build results

The build results window in Visual Studio is plain text. No color coding, no UI elements, just text. This means that you’ll have to scan and read the text to find out if the build was successful, slightly at fault, or a major fuckup. If I recall correctly, the entire build command is output to the window as well, with no soft wrapping, so that the actual error is probably a few thousand pixels to the right, meaning you’ll have to scroll left and right just to read the error message, or even find out if it was an error or a warning. Even if that’s not the case, it’s hard to get an overview over the build process in Visual Studio. There’s a completely different build results pane you can look at instead, which /does/ have color coding and a nice table view. However, you don’t get to see the entire error message, the pane is buggy and displays errors in weird order, and it doesn’t correlate the error to a specific file in a good way. And you can’t easilly get to the corresponding build command to read the exact details of the error.

Once again, please correct me if I’m wrong, even flame me if it’s appropriate. I don’t use Visual Studio that much, and this is mostly taken from memory.

In XCode, if you open the lower pane and click once on an error (double click takes you to the error in the code, as usual), the lower pane scrolls to reveal relevant compiler output.

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Reasons why Visual Studio Sucks #2: No real project find [SORTA-KINDA REDACTED]

In any sane IDE, when you do a project-wide search, you get a search result summary and a result count, allowing you to refine the search if it’s too general, and else jump directly to the relevant files.

In Visual Studio, Project Find works like file find. When you click Find Next, you just get thrown to the next file containing the phrase. No summary, no order, no find count. Just haphazard teleportation through your project, with no overview and a complete sense of loss of control. Euggh.

Update: It seems Visual Studio does indeed have Project Find. It looks completely botchered, though: No result highlights, no file grouping, and no options to refine the search without redoing it entirely. But it’s certainly better than nothing! ctrl-shift-F to bring it forth. Thanks to Eddie Willman and Patrik Sjöberg for sending this in.

(ps. No, I’m not actively trying to make XCode look cool and fancy, and Visual Studio look like crap: that drop shadow is added automatically when you screen shot a single window in mac os)

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Reasons why Visual Studio Sucks #1: MDI

I really don’t like working in Visual Studio, but when people ask me why, I can’t put my finger to it, and I can’t recall any specific reasons. Thus, I’ll write them here whenever I come up with a reason. You’re very welcome to refute the arguments in the comments.

Reason 1: MDI. ‘Nuff said.

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