About Visual Studio

When Visual Studio crashed the 4th time today i really got annoyed. This fragmentation is starting to dry up my creative juice. I can close my eyes on lots of things but this is getting ridiculous. Visual Studio and I are pals( we are together +10h a day. Every day).Yeah....we go back a while ago. Summer of 2000 if i remember correctly. Then Visual Studio became , from a simple name dropped on a CD which contained a bunch of Microsoft IDEs, the one. The SINGLE IDE.

In retrospective stuffing everything in a single IDE it was a bad ideea. I'm sure the complexity skyrocketed. The first version (Visual Studio.NET 2002) was pretty bad...buggy as hell. But hey, i thought, let's give them the benefit of doubt. After all it's the first version and the first version can't be perfect, right ? While VS.NET 2003 patched things a little bit it was still way behind , feature wise, to IDEs like IntelliJ. Visual Studio 2005 added lots of things but things are far from great. I see 2 big problems with Visual Studio :

- you have to pluck the buck every 2-3 years. This is ridiculous. Each version is buggy and incomplete. It is a overall improvement over the last version, but for God's sake, you pay for it every time (for updates). These 2 year updates should be FREE. Think a little ...want to use the ASP.NET designer with a masterpage that contains multiple ContentPlaceholders ? You can't...the frigging thing does not support that NOW. Pay up for next version for this functionality.

- the foundation is a swamp. No, really.... each new feature is added on a foundation full of bugs. They don't have time to iron out all the old bugs but still they keep piling things up. Oracas will add a XAML designer. As with any Microsoft version which is 1.0 i bet that it will be full of bugs. Do you remember the VS.NET 2002 Windows Forms designer and the "white screen of death" ? (which btw is still present in 2005 !!). I'm pretty sure that the XAML designer will have a equivalent to that. Look at their refactoring implementation. Even the most basic thing is not right ....they aren't contextual. Wanna refactor ? Sure....just pull up a big menu and starting racking your brains to see if it works in the current context. If it doesn't you get a useless error message. Nice, eh ?

So, anyway, the future looks bleak. I'm sure Orcas will fix some VS 2005 annoyances while adding a big pile of its own which will be fixed by Visual Studio 2010 which in turn will add.....and so on.
The saddest part is that , with all these, there isn't a VIABLE Visual Studio competitor. (maybe i'm picky but , honestly, i can't call a IDE something that doesn't have an integrated debugger. Very good text editor....yes. But not IDE). We have #Develop (which is really nice but not really up to Visual Studio yet), XDevelop (again...nicely done but not there yet) and....well that's about it. JetBrains dropped their C# IDE. Borland is....well...neah...i'll better not say it aloud.
If someone wants to respond to this by pointing to commercial addins....please save it. You didn't understood anything then.