Posted on Monday, July 03, 2006 9:01 PM
Ok, really not impressions but primarily frustrations. I've actually been using VS 2005 off and on for some time. I can tell you the time I spend away from it is far less stressful than the time I spend with it. For every step forward made with ASP.Net 2.0, the Visual Studio 2005 IDE takes a step backwards.
The UI is extremely unresponsive without major tweaking post installation. This goes from machines that are little more than 2.4ghz Intel w/768MB memory (not necessarily shabby) to AMD 4800+ 64bit Dual Core boxes running 2+Gigs of ram. No matter what system I have, the response is horrid, say when waiting for the properties window to actually catch up with the control I've selected in Design mode. Productivity Killer 1.
You can't edit tags in the designer. What used to be a simple Designer level cut and paste migrating from HTML Tables to asp:Table is now a royal pain in the rear. Doing any design work with asp:Table/asp:TableRow/asp:TableCell is TERRIBLE not because it's difficult but literally because it doesn't exist. Who thought this was a good idea??? Productivity Killer 2.
I'm so very close to just giving up on VS2005 and looking for a better IDE. If you have any ideas, let me know.