Sysadmin Field Notes

March 29, 2005

I thought the one advantage of working in a Windows project was going to be Visual Studio. I thought, "Microsoft's been building this for years, it must be heads and shoulders above Eclipse and what I'm used to." I'm wrong. Even when it comes to features, not counting it's whole model of working, it's behind. The auto complete sucks, no on-the-fly incremental bulding, apparently no way I've found yet to turn off it's infurating "outlining" feature by default...I'm totally shocked. It must be better on the C++/COM side of the house which I'm not using. But the C# part of it appears to be far behind what I'm used to in the Java world. Debugging was a little easier to set up than under Eclipse (when talking to Tomcat); I'll give it that.

But then it requires you to run a web server to load your project. And if there's anything wrong with your web server, like permissions or anything, it just has two error messages to choose from. No logs, no nothing. Just "Sorry, couldn't load your project, fuck off."

Have we not heard of "logfiles" before? How about a "More Information" button at least. Instead, it just says that your web server is installed wrong and points at docs for re-installing things. Nevermind the fact that I've gotten that fucking error message 20 times already, and not once has it ever required re-installing anything. Bad permissions, daring to move a project file on the disk, trying to create a 2nd instance of a project for debugging purposes...those are the real errors.

Some of this is no doubt due to my inexperience with the thing, but it seems that in general there are never any useful errors produced anywhere. Would it be so hard to display an error message? It's not "print shop" where a detailed error would freak Grandma out, it's a fucking IDE, for developers, by developers. I think they might be able to handle "Access denied: http://localhost/projectname/project.csproj".