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Visual Studio Blog

Right now, I'm using VS2k5. The sundry below are also from VS6 and VS7 and VS.Net of various ilk. One common theme is that VS just doesn't want to let you use it as anything less than the complete control system; if you try to use it as just an editor tool, for example, it will do some secret things to screw you over and over.

• 202) When I add an existing project to a solution, it always gets marked to be built. There is on way that I've seen to tell VS to defalut to not building added projects. What a pain.
• 202) It bugs the crap outta me that when you add a source file to a C# project, it secretly copies the file unless you use "Add as Link". And yet, for C++ projects, it doesn't do that copy crap.
• 201) Things that VS2k5 still doesn't fix: Text search doesn't have a long history, it only has the 2 output panes to dump to. Text search cannot show you lines of context like grep -C. If you have a single statement inside curly braces, like { string foo = Bar(); } and you want to see what foo is in the debugger, you are out of luck as far as I can tell (JDB is the same). The "toggle breakpoints" feature doesn't have a keyboard shortcut. Also, it doesn't respect whatever you have hilighted in the breakpoints list. Why can't I (that I've noticed) break on a method call for a given instance? I want to be able to step into a function call without having to go into-outof each function call in the arguments. I'd like to be able to break when a given object (or class, or interface, etc.) is referenced in any way. It is funny how debuggers and multi-threaded apps just never get along. They use '...' even when there is still plenty of room horizontally to show the rest of the contents of the variable. You can't add a project to a solution while you are debugging, which wold be useful to track down references. I wish there were easily found and easily used ways to break on arbitrary things like "any dynamic library load".
• 200) Here's another thing that drives me nuts about VS: the project and solution files are like a billion times more complex looking than a seemingly equivalent nmake file.
• 199) You have to realize that VS is not just an editor, it is an IDE, and if you try to use it with other tools it will be a jealous god and screw you. For example, when I add an already existing source file to my solution, the solution doesn't use that already existing file on disk - it actually makes a copy of the file in VS's own little world. So then any changes to the file I make via VS won't be seen by any other part of my build system. Great. Genius. Thanks. Screw me some more, Microsoft.
• 198) I love how the VS 2005 installer has a progress bar that gets to 100% long before it is done. The installer will keep rotating the beautiful-people-clip-art images at some interval, so I guess you have some indication that it is still alive, but isn't that really the raison d'etre of the bloody progressbar?!
• 197) When calling native code from managed, you might get an exception such as DLL not found, but you might also discover that the debugger can't, or just won't, show you which bloody DLL it failed to find. As much as all the .Net and Java stuff is cool, what with all the interoperability, my experience is that things are too bloody complicated and poorly fleshed-out, so you end up with no (common) tools that can actually help.
• 196) VS doesn't do a good job of helping you figure out a file that has lots of #ifdefs in it. There's the 'outline' mode, but what I'd rather have is proper indentation; it just lines up all directives on the far left, so #if/#else/#endif stuff of any depth is hard to understand.
• 195) Face it, the whole thing is a joke. Just compare the capabilities of the system for e.g.: searching for text in files vs. using plain old unix utilities like grep: there is nothing like -A or -B.
• 194) The whole UI is just suck when it comes to having multiple files open, because they are listed in the order they were opened and there is no way to tell the system to order their tabs in some logical / conceptual order. So pretty much all the time the files are in some random order, which obviously does nothing to help you be organized. Feel the hate.
• 193) If I'm doing a big file string search, and then decide in the middle of it that I want to do another one, then I want the first one to be cancelled and the second one started. But the way VS is treating my second request is to only stop the first search. Then, I have to go back to the find-in-files UI and it has lost the second string I was looking for and is showing me the first one again. So I have to re-enter my search terms and only then will it get cracking on the second search. Whatever!
• 192) It drives me up the wall when documentation or code browsers do not show return values. MSDN doesn't. Visual Studio often doesn't. Java docs? They do!
• 191) Is it me, or can I not get an old school, fat, block cursor in VS?
• 190) I wish everything could do EMACS's "replace strings, and use the case of the string that is being replaced so I don't have to laboriously first replace all lower case ones and then all upper case ones." Argh.
• 189) What is the point of having a list of "Recent Files" when it doesn't actually list the files I've recently been looking at? E.g.: if I open a file from the Solution view itself, that file isn't added to the list. Only if I get to the file via File/Open/File (that last part is new in VS7, and utterly hateful) command will it be added to the list. Whatever.
• 188) When using regular expressions in a search, you cannot use tagged matches in the Find string, only in the Replace string. So you can't easily find C++ constructors, which is easy in Perl using something like "m/([^:\s]*?)::\1/".
• 187) You can't take multi-file search results and do a narrowing search on those results. What would be grep-pipe-grep in Unix.
• 186) Okay, more cause for pistol-whipping. The Find in File dialog can expand into a Find-and-Replace dialog. However, once you've expanded it by clicking on the button with the "more" arrows on it, you cannot revert back to the play and simple find functionality. Instead you have to close the whole dialog box and bring it back up again. Hello?
• 185) Fascist piece of crap. The whole implementation of the Solution Explorer window sucks, but leaving aside that I think the approach is wrong from the get-go, let me pick on one detail. When you open a file from the File menu, if that file is in your Solution Explorer, the SE will zoom to that file, opening any parent folders. Which I kinda hate. But, then it goes and fails to clean up after itself; when you close the file, it doesn't automatically close the SE's path to it either (assuming no other files in that path are open, yadda yadda).
• 184) Maybe there is and I just don't know, but there doesn't seem to be a way to easily switch between the .cpp and the .h versions of a method. That sucks.
• 183) The tabs of open files aren't arranged in an order that I'd like. I'm anal and always want the .h immediately to the left of the .cpp. I wish this piece of poo IDE had that ability. How hard can a regexp like that be?
• 182) There's a new file I have. I've got it open for editing in VS. I want to add it to the current project. Can I right-click on the file's title bar and add it? No. I apparently have to laboriously go through the regular steps of adding an existing file to the project. That sucks.
• 181) Dunno if I've mentioned this one, but when I close a file in VS7, it moves the Solution Explorer view based on the next window in the stack. If the Solution Explorer has lots of stuff in it, that could be really fara way. And. I. Hate. That. When I open a file and realize that oh, wait, I wanted the one next to it, I close th wrong one first - but that changes my Solution Explorer view drastically, and I have to manually renavigate to open the other file. The other file which was right in front of me in the SE view a second ago, before this bloody program decided to go and cock everything up. Hate!
• 180) I know HTML can render differently in different places, and so the concept of line numbers is sketchy, but I have an HTML file that really is just a text file with explicit line breaks in it and everything. I really want line numbers here, even if they are fake ones. Just give me the bloody option.
• 179) When I have a single file in a window that has a split bar in it, and I double-click on the split bar, I want the part of the window that last got a mouse click (setting the text karet) to become the full window. Instead, it seems to always choose the bottom one. Whatever.
• 178) It doesn't keep undo/redo information per-buffer, apparently. I delete something, switch files, do stuff, then switch back and do Ctrl-Y... and nothing happens. Nice!
• 177) In pretty much any view of a file, you can have horizontal split bars so you can simultaneously look at two places in the same file. Oh, wait, except for rendered HTML. Whatever.
• 176) I'm pissed off that it is so modal. When I am debugging, all my windows are different than when I'm not debugging. I understand the reasons for that, but it is annoying to start debugging and then try to click on something only to have it move or disappear or be replaced by something I really didn't want to click on, you know? Bah, humbug!
• 175) How many times have I written C/C++ code where I've had a set of regular parenthases and inside them I used curly brackets? Off the top of my head, I'd say probably never. Yet, when I save a .cpp file, I get no warnings.
• 174) Let me reiterate that the whole Solution vs. Project thing is a steaming pile of poo, at least when it comes to the UI. E.g.: why is it called Recent Projects, and yet is shows solutions?
• 173) Apparently, you can't do simple addition or subtraction of memory addresses in the "Memory 1" etc. windows. Lame!
• 172) It can be useful that VS shows you, via tooltips, the values of things you hover your mouse pointer over e.g.: enums, but it only shows them in decimal. 32768 sucks when your enums are flags and you want to see 0x8000 instead.
• 171) I love how when you open a large file in VS it just goes out to lunch. No feedback - no progress bar no nothing. Oh, also, it freaks out drawing the really big line numbers, tee hee.
• 170) VS7 lets you collapse functions. The widgets to do that get in the way of letting me select the whole line by clicking at the far left of it. It sucks. I never even want to collapse things. Yet I cannot turn that off. I'm in hell.
• 169) Breakpoints are shown as file and line number. Which is nigh useless when you have more than one breakpoint in a file. Why doesn't it tell me what method the breakpoint is in?
• 168) Ctrl-G in VS7 brings up the "Go To Line" dialog box. It automatically puts in the current line number, blowing out anything that was in there the last time you used it. Now, the current line number is just about always guaranteed to be the wrong thing - I mean, that's the point of bringing up the dialog, is to go somewhere else. Whatever!
• 167) Why, yes, more killing does need to be done: In VS7 if you have your text cursor in a word and do Ctrl-H (or whatever you have it bound to) it will copy the word into the Find/Replace dialog. However, if you have a larger string selected and do Ctrl-H it won't put that string in. So you have to copy and paste it. Uh, yeah, that's brilliant. Update: well, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. No clear rhyme or reason.
• 166) When setting up debugging in VS7, there's the Working Directory entry. However, it doesn't have a button to let you browse to find the directory. No, you have to type it in textually. Whatever.
• 165) I find it annoying that VS7 says "Save FooBar As..." rather than just "Save As..." because it is much harder to just let my brain to auto-pattern-matching when looking at the File menu when the bloody string keeps changing.
• 164) Somehow, VS7 is in a mode now where when I type the double quote mark on my keyboard in the Find text field, it does smart quotes. Which have never been used in the source code I'm working on, so of course the match never happens. I have never had this happen before, and I have absolutely no idea how it got into this mode. Or even why it would have such a mode. What a living hell.
• 163) I feel compelled to explain yet another completely ass-backwards thing about VS7. When you have multiple files opened, you see them as tabs. They have a linear order from left to right. However, apparently this has nothing to do with the stacking order, which I guess is the order you'd see in the list-of-Windows menu. So if you click on a tab and close that file, there is nothing in the tabs to indicate what buffer will be shown next. This has bitten me several times where I want to close e.g.: all-but-one of the windows because basically random windows are brought forward as I close things. Very stupid and hateful and annoying! Basically, the fundamental problem is that there are too many representations of the set of windows, and they conflict in their ordering information. Hate.
• 162) I know I'm overly sensitive, but why do computers have to such so much on a regular basis? Like, I'm working in VS all night on a project. I quit and go home and come back the next day and load up VS and the project (sorry, "solution" - bite me!) I just spent the last gazillion hours working on isn't even in the list of recent ones, so I have to manually go load it. What. Ever.
• 161) In e.g.: the Locals window in VS7 once you select a line, you can't unselect them all. Like, you can't click on the blank line at the bottom of the list and end up with no line selected. Which is a pain because the inverse-video that shows what is selected really sucks when the thing just changed because you get red-on-blue. Blah.
• 160) We all know that macros in C suck a lot of buttocks. So you'd think that a modern compiler would try to maybe help you out, by giving you a really good, explanatory description of what went wrong in the application/parsing of the macro. But, no, it just says "syntax error near ')'" and I want to start the shooting.
• 159) VS7 is supposed to be hot poop on a stick that can edit everything, right? So I open a .xml file in it and it doesn't even give me a way to collapse stuff in tag begin/end pairs down. Whatever.
• 158) At least in VS7, you can't copy the name of a file from the Solution/Project Explorer. Or anywhere else that I can find. Or the path to it. Yay.
• 157) So in some windows in VS7 you can do Ctrl-BackSpace to delete the previous word. However, it doesn't work in all text fields. E.g.: when you are in the Help Search fields. What a living hell.
• 156) In VS7 once you add a file or folder to a project, you can't move its around in the list. That I've figured out. Anyway. Please, just start the killing already, will you?
• 155) I do a file search across "All Searchable Items;d:/foo" and then I do one across "All Searchable Items;" and then finally "All Searchable Items". The middle one returns no hits... Where Can I Start The Whippings Please?
• 154) Any editor without a dired mode like EMACS is not a real editor.
• 153) I want to find out what is #defining DEBUG. Why don't IDEs give you a way to debug the preprocessor interactively or something? So I can have a 'watch' on DEBUG so I can see what is defining it? (I've already gone through all the VS project files and removed any DEBUG crap, so I'm completely at a loss to explain what in the heck is going on.)
• 152) Is it just me, or shouldn't our IDEs be able to tell us which #ifdef we're #ending? This is the next millenium, you know. God, hell.
• 151) Why is it apparently too much to ask for VS7 to be able to show you argv in a useful way? Like an actual list of the strings? Instead it only shows the first one. WTF?
• 150) The Find in VS7 sucks, yay. You can choose to search "Current Project" but there isn't any option to search "Current Solution". There is "All Searchable Items", but what the hell does that mean? Why not have a "Current Solution" when VS7 introduced the whole idea?
• 149) Why is it that the Configuration Manager dialog, which is dirt simple, has a Help button, but the Project Properties dialog, which is way more complicated does not?
• 148) I'm looking at the Properties of a Project in VS7 and it has a field in the dialog box called "Start Application." Yet when I search for "start application" in the help index, it finds no exatch match. Nice.
• 147) I love how in VS7 there are windows (e.g.: the Task List) with tables in them where double-clicking on the column seperator doesn't auto-adjust their width. Whatever.
• 146) In VS6 if you did a build and got errors, it wouldn't run the program. In VS7 now it asks you if you want to run the program. I pretty much don't, and so it sucks to have this extra step of telling the dialog box what I want to do. I wish it were clear how I could tell VS7 to assume I don't want to run it, and not ask me. Blah!
• 145) You find text in many files. You change the text. You then go back to the find results and double-click on the hits. They no longer do anything, presumably because you've changed the text so they no longer match. Yet, the results contain the line number at the time they matched. Why doesn't it just take you there, at least? Sheesh.
• 144) I start a multi-file text search. It goes. I want to do another search. The Find button is grayed out. I click on the Stop button and nothing happens. The search will not die. Yes! Is it only when I use searching with regular expressions? Who knows. All I know is this thing is a tub of poo.
• 143) Is it me, or is there no readily apparent way to step a given number of times? Like, if I want to tell the debugger to step twenty times, I have to physically hit F10 twenty times, right? Lame!
• 142) You can have a solution in VS7 with files in it but there isn't a way to copy a filename out of there. The properties of the file in the Solution Explorer don't include the filename, so you can't copy it from there. I haven't found any place I can right-click on the name and choose Copy and have it copy the text of the filename. Whatever!
• 141) If you open a project/solution in VS7 using the File/Open/Project command, and that project already exists in the File/Recent Projects list, the project is not bumped up to be the first entry in that list. Which is what should happen. Duh!
• 140) I love how, for pretty much any search dialog, VS does its damndest to put the wrong default values in there. Like, I do Ctrl-g to go to a line, enter a value, do stuff, switch to other files, come back (haven't done any other Ctrl-g's although I did do text searches) to the original file and go Ctrl-g again, and the default value is not the last value I entered. What. Ever.
• 139) For this, I really would start the you-know-what-ing. I've got a few files open in VS7. One of them is being written to by another process, so it is changing. I'm not looking at that file, though, I'm editing a different one at the time. However, VS decides to, every 5 to 20 seconds, put up a dialog box telling me that the other file has changed, and asking me if I want to revisit the file. It doesn't give me the option of telling it to go to hell and leave me alone - at least, not in that dialog box; you know, the "never show me this stupid thing ever again you jerk" type options as seen in IE (you can apparently turn detection off from elsewhere, though. Update: sure, you can turn it off, but there doesn't appear to be any menu command like "Refresh" so I guess you have to manually close and reopen the file?!!!!). Emacs is smart enough to only ask you if you want the new version of the file when you switch to that buffer. You cannot begin to comprehend how annoying this all is.
• 138) What is the point of the Recent Files list when it doesn't update to include - get this - files that you've recently visited? Please, give me strength. (Update: Specifically, if another application sends a request to VS to look at a file, then that file doesn't show up on the Recent Files list.)
• 137) In VS6 you could click on the toolbar button to stop the Find-in-Files, but apparently you can't do that in VS7. You have to go a further step, and press the Stop button in the dialog box that comes up. What a living hell.
• 136) In the Find-in-Files dialog box, when you click on the path, the whole text is immediately selected and the view is scrolled to the end of the text. I am hard pressed to convey how completely mind-blowingly evil and hateful and wrong that is. It gets worse the longer your path is, and the closer to the start you want to perform an edit. God, I hate everyone.
• 135) Is it me, or can I not use regular expressions when trying to replace text, only when finding it? Can everybody just go to hell already?
• 134) It pisses me off that I can only have breakpoints based on source line numbers. So if I want to debug code that is like if(foo){bar;} I have to split it so the bar; is on its own line. Right?
• 133) Apparently, you cannot 'undo' deleting a breakpoint. Sucks.
• 132) In VS6, there's View / Output, but then the actual docked window you want it titled "Debug". Yay.
• 131) Here's a feature suggestion: When you get the results of a Find, you might get a bazillion hits in some subdirectory you don't care about. It would be nifty if there were a way to collapse those down so you didn't have to manuall scroll through to find their end, and the start of interesting results.
• 130) In VS6, as the results of a Find came in you could scroll up through them no problem. VS7 apparently keeps the cursor in the window at the end of the text, and appends new results there, and forces the scroll position to the end whenever it adds results. So if you scroll up, the view will immediately scroll back down to the very end. You have to manually move the cursor somewhere else and then you can scroll. Did nobody use VS7 before they shipped it?
• 129) VS C++ 6.0 and now 7.0/.Net both have a really crappy thing about their debugger: when you go up the call stack, the little pointer shows the next instruction, not the one you are currently inside. If the code above has any sort of branching, it can be hard if not impossible to determine which branch is being executed! This is insane!
• 128) This. Is. Killing. Me. I'm working on a couple of source trees at the same time, and VS (any version) just completely bites my poop in dealing with this. Like, there's the XP-or-something style Open dialog box that has a shortcut bar on the left, and yet I cannot add anything to that. Augh!
• 127) MS programs seem to always start off in the wrong folder when I'm trying to open a file. VS7 will start off in the folder that the currently-being-edited file is in. That sucks when I: navigate to a new folder, open a file there, figure out I want a different file from there, close the file, and then try to open the new one - because now I'm back in the old folder that is light years away from where I wanna be, namely the last folder where I opened a document. I think if it just opened from the last visited folder it would end up being less annoying? Or if there were at least a quick list of the last 5 folders I've visited to get me there, so I don't have to re-navigate through the torturous file hierarchy?
• 126) Up until now, most of the eXtremely suPid things about VS .Net have been annoying... but this really takes the cake: in the Locals window, it will no longer show you the string value of a pointer. Running the same thing in VS6, on the other hand, does show the string vlaue of it. So they explicitly and purposefully got rid of something that was obviously useful. This. Is. Insanity. Furthermore, the Type column lists it as "--" which I guess means unknown. But the thing is a member variable, so it must have a type, even if it is just void or something. What the hell is this crap?
• 125) VS7 screws the pooch yet again. It used to be in VS6 that Ctrl+K would do ConditionalDown to find the next matching preprocessor statements. That binding is no longer thus in VS7 and, furthermore, the help contains absolutely no references to "ConditionalDown".
• 124) VS7 rules again: "No suitable target for find was specified or another find error occurred." God, I hate everybody. Wait, I mean, "whatever, ship it!"
• 123) I am obviously living in some kind of parallel hell universe. In VS7's Locals window, you can see the Name, Value and Type of variables. Okay, that's nice. You could do that in VS6. So the new thing they added to VS7 is that you cannot, apparently, copy out the Value. If you try to double-click on the row's Value field, it only serves to select the whole row. When you Copy and Paste, you see that the entire row was copied. This is utter insanity. Update: turns out those values are read-only so VS doesn't want you selecting the Value and editing it. Unfortunately, the side effect is that I cannot even copy the values easily, a task which obviously doesn't need to threaten the constantcy of the Value. Whatever. Jerks.
• 122) In VS7, when I right-click on a Solution in the Solution Explorer, the menu which comes up is different when the debugger is running. I realize that right-click is supposed to be context-sensitive but it kinda sucks ass that in one mode I get "Add Existing Project" in addition to "Add Existing Item", and in the other I only get "Add Existing Item". Actually, the interface is even worse than that because it is "Add" with entries "Existing Project" and then - get this - "Add Existing Item" so that is really "Add Add Existing Item". Whatever, it is just one complete cluster you-know-what.
• 121) I'm trying to open a project in VS7. The "Add Existing Project" dialog is showing me the contents of a directory. It is in "List" mode. The things it shows are not in any order that makes any sense - they certainly aren't alphabetically listed. Whatever.
• 120) The VS7 insanity continues. If I'm typing stuff into the Find dialog, and I hit Ctrl-a, everything in the text file gets selected rather than the whole word in the dialog box text entry field. What. The. Hell. Kind. Of. Crack. Are. These. People. On?
• 119) Whoever did the UI in VS7 just completely keeps on screwing the pooch. It used to be in VS6 that with Find/Replace you could use Alt-r to keep on replacing. Now it is all cocked up. The first replace you do puts focus somewhere other than on the Find/Replace docked dialog, which means when you hit Alt-r nothing happens (well, the bell rings to let you know it isn't mapped, or something). In VS6 this all worked just fine.
• 118) Nice! I go to VS7's Help Contents and get a dialog box saying "Help is updating to reflect your recent changes. This may take several minutes." There is no cancel button. The app is totally unresponsive and out to lunch. It doesn't even tell me what the hell it is doing; I guess I can tell it is doing something because I can hear the hard drive churning! Yay. So much for usability.
• 117) It finally gets done doing whatever it had to do to bring up Help (took like literally 5 minutes), and now the Help windows are docked in VS. I want them large so I undock them. I do a search, the results show up elsewhere, docked in VS. The undocked help appears to be always-on-top, so I can't even really see the results. This is just insanity. What a complete crock of crap, what a complete step backwards from how it all was in VS6.
• 116) Lo, I am full of hate. VS6 would take you back if you hit Ctrl-* (on the numeric keypad I think), and VS7 completely does absolutely nothing instead.
• 115) VS7 has also apparently done away with the VS6 useful file type filters for the multi-file search. E.g.: there's nothing for searching just .h type files.
• 114) There are some modes in VS7 that won't give you "All Files (*.*)" in the Open File dialog. What is up with that?
• 113) Sufficeth to say, the way you add External Tools to VS7 sucks a lot of hairy buttocks. Like, you can't copy a tool entry and edit it. You always have to start a tool setup from scratch. And if you try to click on another tool while creating a new one, so you can see what the params you want are, it tells you that you must have a command entered before it will let you do that. But the point is I want to find out what the full command is from the other, already existing, tool! Cripes!
• 112) The way you tell VS7 to do a text search in certain directories is really really bad.
• 111) The tooltips in VS6 used to tell you the keyboard shortcut (e.g.: for Step In, in the debugger). They no longer appear in VS7. That pretty much sucks hairy buttocks. Why they go to all the trouble of removing good ideas and then apparently putting effort into crappy ones, I do not know.
• 110) Riddle me this: Why does VS7 let me set a break point in a text file? And, why doesn't it let me double-click to select a word in the Output window? I can click and drag to select things, but double-clicking on a word, which would select that word in any editor window, does nothing. What. Ever!
• 109) Is it still me? I've got the Class View showing and I am working on source code, on a particular class, but I don't see how to get the Class View to select the class I'm working on. This. Is. Insane.
• 108) Is it me? In VS7/.Net I've got ClassA, which has some pure virtual functions, and then it has descendants. More than one. There's like 2 direct descendants, and then more from there. ClassB is a direct child. In the Class View or Object Browser, I can see ClassB but not ClassA. So I open up ClassA and it says that ClassB is its parent. But there doesn't appear to be any way to see all the children of ClassA. Which is what I would like to be able to do, of course...
• 107) As if the UI for VS wasn't bad enough, they had to go and add the idea of a "Solution" to VS7, so now you have "Projects" and "Solutions" (dunno whatever happened to "Workspaces"). What. Ever. To be even more confusing, you can open Recent Files, and Recent Projects, but there is nothing about Recent Solutions.
• 106) Say you have a file open in VS .Net, from the top of your list of items in your current Project, er, sorry, "Solution". Then you go and open a new file that is at the bottom of the list of items. So you have to scroll the project view all the way to the bottom. But you double-clicked on the wrong one - you wanted the one next to it. So you close the window. Ah, now it gets good! VS decides that since the main text window that is open is the first one, it scrolls the project view all the way back up to the top so you can see where the file is in the project. Which means you then have to manually scroll to the bottom again!
• 105) VS .Net's variable watching windows apparently don't support auto-resizing of columns when you double-click on the seperators. Kinda lame.
• 104) VS 6 had this lame thing where the File menu had "Open" and then also had a seperate "Open Workspace" entry. That seems really stupid and annoying to me. I think there should just be one single Open, and it should do the right thing if I load a workspace, rather than a .cpp file, or whatever. Now, with VS .NET, they've gone and gotten rid of the "Open Workspace" command and instead the "Open" command now has a sub menu. This is actually even more annoying to me, because now when I'm opening a file I have to go through an extra step. That just seems completely soft in the head to me. Bah! Humbug!
• 103) I'm so glad that apparently the default keybindings in Visual Studio .NET are significantly different from those for previous versions e.g.: in version 6, Alt+9 would bring up the list of breakpoints. Now that appears to be some meta key in the .NET version. Whatever.
• 102) Why is it that keyboard mapping editing is always a super suckful experience? Like, in Visual Studio I haven't seen a way to find out what command a key actually runs. Like, I can hit F12, and it does something, but I want to know the name of the command so I can, for example, rebind it. God, hell.
• 101) Let me count the ways I hate Visual Studio... Oh, well, okay, that would take forever so I'll just tell you the latest one: the name given to windows follows no rhyme or reason that respects human expectations. I have two files with the same name "A" but in different directories, one being a sub directory of the other; "/dir1" and "/dir1/dir2". However I loaded those files in VS, they end up named "A" and "/dir1/A" which makes completely no sense to me what-so-ever. If anything, they should read "A" and "dir2/A" or "/dir1/A" and "/dir1/dir2/A" etc. You catch my drift.
• 100) VS6 can actually pretty nicely completely screw you; say you are looking at a variable in the debugger. Say it is currently being shown in decimal. You select it. Then, you decide you'd rather see it in hex. It is still selected. You right-click and choose the hexidecimal view. Things in the Variables window now change to show themselves as hex values... however, the variable value you had selected changes to be just the decimal numbers in hex. So if you had 10, now you'd have 0x10 when it should be 0xa (the other fields transform correctly). This is pretty mind blowing. So, anwyay, now you keep on chugging and your variable value has changed! And you might not have noticed VC's screw up, and you could pretty much be in total hell. Nice! That's what the Danes call quality!
• 99) Couldn't they have made VS6 make a different noise when it finishes a build with vs. without any errors?
• 98) So I was working on a workspace in VC++. So then I switch to working on an entirely different workspace. Whenever I go to open a file now, Visual Studio starts the file browser off in a directory from the old workspace. Lord in heaven give me strength. If I rename the old directory so that VS can't find it, it correctly puts me into a directory of the new workspace. If, however, I reset the old directory's name, VS goes back to using it. So who, exactly, do I get to thrash for this?
• 97) It doesn't seem like you can customize (let alone easily) the way VS6 does it's formatting (vs., say, EMACS). And their autoformatter can get pretty confused like when you have complex parts of a for loop. Whatever.
• 96) VS6 shows you all the errors in the Output frame, but isn't smart enough to keep the view at the top of the output when you compile. Since you always want to look at the very first error, since that often is what caused all the others, in a chain-reaction, you always have to manually scroll all the way back up to the top of the output. Stoooopid!
• 95) Visual Studio continues to shock me with just how much of a steaming piece of dog poop it really is. I'm sure the compiler is okay, but the UI - even on version six, so they've had plenty of time to get it right - is pretty much pathetic. For example, in the Debug output, you can't double-click on a word to select it. That's a big "Whatever!"
• 94) I start a build in VS6. Then I realize I want to add a file into one of the project folders. I right-click on the folder, intending to use the Add File command. But it isn't there. It isn't that it is grayed out, it just completely isn't there. Apparently VS6 is really modal; I have to stop the compilation to get the command back. It just seems really wrong to me for the command to disappear rather than be disabled and grayed out.
• 93) Running some code in the VC++ debugger. It is loading a file. It isn't writing to the file. The file is write protected on disk. I can't cat or stat or od or view the file while the debugger is reading it. Apparently the Win2K file system has a lock on the whole thing. That's what the Danes call quality.
• 92) Sure, Visual Studio has the ability to search for things in files, but you can't chain filters - the idea of unix stdin and stdout is just so much more useful at times. E.g.: if you are looking only for hits on line 101 or something, you have to search through Visual Studio's results manually. Whatever.
• 91) Sure, I can remap Ctrl-W to close windows in Visual Studio... sometimes. Like, it now works for text files, but when I'm editing a binary file it still does something entirely different. There isn't anything which tells me what editor mode binary files use so I don't know which of "Main", "Text", "Dialog" or "Image" to update. Whatever. Piece of crap. Let alone having it nicely show you what and where Ctrl-w is already bound to.
• 90) Hm. I have 2 copies of Visual Studio going. I think they share the same "last place I was in the Open File Dialog" so when I muck around in one, I have to re-naviagte back to where I was in the other. Sucks ass!
• 89) Visual Studio is just such a complete piece of crap. It tries to give you the ability to find the definitions of methods and stuff, but unless you manually delete all the .sbr and .bsc files and rebuild everything, as soon as I edit like five lines of code the thing has lost its mind. If you are going to have some feature then don't be half-assed about it becuase it just ends up looking like you didn't know what the hell you were doing, okay?
• 88) Which brings up another point: too many things in Visual Studio are called Windows. That is a really bad. There are things like the Definitions and References window. But the menu bar entry "Window" doesn't contain the Definitions and References window, it only contains the names of the buffers of the files I'm editing. Argh!
• 87) Visual Studio has "Help Keyboard" which is a dialog that shows you what commands are available and what keys they are bound to. The kicker? It is a modal dialog. Can we please start the torture?
• 86) It is just peachy that underscores aren't considered to be word seperators in Visual Studio. Actually, in general, Ctrl-Left and Ctrl-Right Arrow are both pretty stupid and broken; if you have "LongWord1LongWord2" then there is no way to get the cursor to the end of LongWord1, before the space, using the Ctrl-Arrows. (In EMACS, you can get there.)
• 85) It is so great that you can't do multiple line search and replace in Visual Studio (without resorting to regular expressions, which I haven't tried, so I don't know for sure that it is even possible then). Like, the obvious thing of selecting a few lines of text, hitting Ctrl-H and entering the replacement word (I'm not even trying to replace with more than one line of text!), totally doesn't work. At all.
• 84) Uh, so if I have a selection region of text in Visual Studio, is there no way to sort those lines? The help sucks ass, of course; I try to search for 'sort' in just the Visual Studio set of documents and get a million hits for C++. Whatever.
• 83) I don't suppose Visual Studio has any little icon that shows you when a file is read-only, does it? Like, that would be too useful?
• 82) I'm so glad that Visual Studio is such a piece of crap that it can get confused about how big a text file is and break all the scroll bars.
• 81) VC++ will fill in the name of the method if you hit tab (when the little autocomplete helper thing is turned on), yet it will not fill out the type of the parameter to the method. Whatever.
• 80) I kinda wish Visual Studio had some kind of revision markings for text. Sometimes I'm flipping through files, cutting and pasting text, and I'll hit some keys out of synch and then it can be kinda confusing to figure out what I just pasted wrongly where.
• 79) Is it me, or can you not re-order things in Visual Studio's Workspace?
• 78) Trying to get Help documentation for Visual Studio is crap. I pick "Visual Studio Product Documentation" as my Active Subset and I still get all these crappy references to things like the MFC CFindReplaceDialog class when all I bloody well want is to find out how to use the Mark All stuff in the Find dialog (like, I know it marks them all, but I want to then be able to skip from one to the next with some keyboard shortcut, I don't want to have to scroll looking for marks) when I'm searching through a source file. Hate hate hate.
• 77) Visual Studio has tabbed views of, like, the Build, Debug and Find output. So I'm looking through the Debug output and I find some string I want to search for in the project. So I do that, and it switches me to the Find output. When I switch back to the Debug output, you'd expect that it would have the same view as when I left, with the text I was searching for hilighted and everything. Instead, it seems to reset the view to wherever the cursor was before I selected a region. Basically, it puts me somewhere that is completely unrelated to where I was when it (not me!) changed the view. Whatever.
• 76) The debugger in VC++ is really pissing me off. Say you put in a breakpoint. So now there is a little red stop sign icon in the left margin. When the program stops there, you also see the yellow arrow that points to the current statement. If you then tell the program to 'Go', the little yellow arrow doesn't go away, so it looks like the app hasn't actually gone anywhere. The only way to tell is to look and see if the 'Go' and 'Step' toolbar buttons are grayed out (woe if you don't have that toolbar showing). Hell, even those are sometimes grayed out when they shouldn't be. All in all, it is just a huge piece of excrement. And remember, we're talking about like version six of this bloody thing.
• 75) I'm debugging something in VC++. I'm looking at the output from the program in the Output window. I want to copy something out of there. I double-click on it. Nothing is selected. Ooookayyy...
• 74) I'm using the debugger in VC++ ("Well, there's your problem!"). I have some breakpoints. The app I'm debugging takes focus, and then a breakpoint is hit in the debugger. The task bar entry for VC++ flashes annoyingly and eventually the window for VC++ changes its titlebar from the de-activated gray color to the activated blue color. Yet the app doesn't really have focus; typing any keys doesn't do anything! Whatever.
• 73) Oy veh. The Open dialog in VC++ will show you a list of file name completions based on what you've typed in so far. If you use your mouse to pick one of those, it takes a while for the thing to actually close the menu and put the text in the field. Meanwhile, as you move your mouse around the selection in the menu of completions is still updating, so you are really unsure what in the hell it finally decided to put in there. Just a completely lame feedback scenario.
• 72) I want to copy the return value of some routine in the VC++ debugger so I can paste it in elsewhere. If the value were a regular variable, I'd be able to select it and copy it. Since it isn't a variable, the debugger doesn't want me to be able to select it in the same way, because I shouldn't be able to edit the value. However, it seems to also not let me just copy the value.
• 71) You can see a dump of memory in the VC++ debugger, but you can't then actually edit the memory, as far as I can tell. Suck ass. Oh, wait, I'm told that maybe it will let me edit the mems if they aren't locked by the system. Good thing there isn't any indication of that in the UI, or and explanation of that in the Help (and just try searching for "memory window" and see how helpful the results are).
• 70) VC++ has a dialog box to show you what threads are around, but you can't leave it up while running. It would be nice to not have to bring it up and dismiss it every time I want to run to the next breakpoint. I mean, it doesn't even have to update until the next breakpoint. Whatever.
• 69) Use can Alt-drag to make a rectangular selection in VC++ but you can't then replace only in that selection; the option is grayed out in the Replace dialog box. Great.
• 68) In VC++ you can tell the debugger to start the running app all over again from the beginning. There's a specific button for that. It bugs me that it doesn't actually just start the app, but breaks at the start so you have to hit the Go button again before it actually restarts.
• 67) VC++ is apparently limited to having 2048 characters on a line. It will forcibly wrap the line by inserting a break. That pretty much breaks (get it?) the line, and your program stops working. Yeah, that is really smart. Boy, look at EMACS. Look at how it has a line limit of 2048 characters... oh, wait, it doesn't.
• 66) I bet I've mentioned this before, but it was killing me again so: It sucks how in VC++ the Recent File and Recent Workspace sub menus take a while to actually appear. So, like I go to the Recent Files and then realize I want the Recent Workspaces, so I move the mouse over that entry and then I even click... and still nothing has happened; the Recent File sub menu hasn't even gone away. Great. Nice. Perfect.
• 65) You know, I don't think there has ever been a time when VC++ asked me if, after I told it to run, I wanted to build out-of-date files that I've said No, I don't want it to build the out-of-date files. That dialog just plain sucks ass, as far as I'm concerned. And there's no way to turn it off?
• 64) Seems like every day I have to go through the whole deal of blowing away all the .sbr files, and the .bsc to get stupid poop-headed VC++ to have browse information that is even remotely like right.
• 63) VC++ doesn't have scroll bars in the data view windows in the debugger. So if the variable you want to look at happens to be a long string, you are screwed. I have to ask what the point of a variable watch window is if you can't even see what the values are? I mean, it goes to all the trouble of dereferencing the pointer so you can see what the string is, but then it just lops it off with no way to see the rest of it!
• 62) Have I mentioned that recently the toolbars in VC++ cannot remember where I placed them last? Seems like ever day that I fire up VC++, the toolbars are back to their old broken stupid annoying wrong hateful location.
• 61) I love how you can use the mouse wheel in VC++ but it doesn't realize you have moved into another window for a second so it first scrolls the other window you were just in rather than the one you are currently pointing too. Because detecting which window your mouse pointer is currently in is an NP-complete problem? Oh, yeah, and furthermore how some windows absolutely refuse to move until you click in them, while others just have this stupid delay. Oh, yeah, and also how sometimes you can roll up up up but there is still a final line that won't show itself until you use the scroll bar up arrow?! So, basically, there is nothing that works totally right. Magnifique!
• 60) The debugging output of VC++ is always scrolled such that the last line of output is in the middle. So half of the space is completely wasted. Which means if you want to see a larger region of stuff as the program is running, you have to make your window twice as tall. Stooopid!
• 59) So you can change between seeing things as hex values and decimal values in the VC++ debugger. However, it doesn't ever show pointers in decimal, apparently.
• 58) I have two projects I'm working on; one is a branch of another. So, they look awefully similar. I can't tell which is which from anything VC++ displays normally. Any file paths are cut off so I can't see up far enough to know which project I'm in. So, I go to try and change the name of the workspace by right-clicking on the Workspace and getting the Properties and trying to edit the Workspace Name field. But it doesn't let me. Of course, it doesn't give me any explanation for why I cannot edit it, or, thus, how I might possibly get the ssytem into a state where I could edit it. Nuke it from orbit. It is the only way to be sure.
• 57) I have a variable I'm looking at in the debugger in VC++. It is a string. I am shown the pointer value and the string value in the Variables window. Unfortunately, I can only copy out the pointer value. Sweet.
• 56) I have a return value shown in the Variables window. It is a pointer. I cannot drag and drop that into the Memory window. Even though I can do that with all other pointer variable values. Can we please start the ass-whoopin'?
• 55) Is it me, or does VC++ lack a little interpreted expression evaluator? Hm. I guess you have to just go into the debugger and enter it into the Watch window.
• 54) Say you are hacking up some C++ code. You run your thing, and you get a division by zero error. If, like me, you are on a box that doesn't have a debugger available, it would be neat if I could search through my C++ source code for places where I do divisions. VC++ can't do that. You only get a text search, and searching for '/' isn't going to give you useful results, now is it?
• 53) Okay, so I can pick a command in VC++ and bind a key to it, but I can't simply find what commands are bound to a given key stroke sequence. So if, for example, I want to turn off some really annoying, pain-in-the-ass binding that VC++ uses by default, it sucks. Suck! Sheesh.
• 52) Seems like every time I start up VC++, my toolbars have moved from where I set them to be the last time I used it. This is driving me bonkers!
• 51) Is it me, or... In VC++ you can select a method and then hit Alt-F12 to find out where that method is defined & referenced. It appears to me that it doesn't distinguish among different constructors for an object, though! It seems to do that okay for other kinds of methods with multiple signatures?
• 50) Is it me? Just me? I am trying to add a file to my project in VC++ and it gives me a dialog box telling me that the file already exists in the project. Does it tell me where the bloody thing thinks it exists? Nooooo, that would maybe be too helpful. Instead, I want to look through the 20+ folders and zillion+ files manually to see if that frikkin' file name is in there, somewhere. Gimme strength.
• 49) VC++ can try to auto-indent stuff as you type. So I'm editing a .h file and I've got the constructor and destructor signatures. After them, I'm working on some comments. I want the comments to be more to the left than the signatures (since the signatures don't have any return types, the first non-whitespace characters on those lines are pretty far over to the right due to the way I like to format my text). So I hit return a couple of times after the constructor. VC++ is trying to line up my comments with the first non-whitespace character of the previous signatures, so I have to hit backspace to get the comment starting from the left. No big deal, until I hit return after the first comment line I entered, and the cursor on the new line doesn't line up with the comment immediately above it. Instead, it lines up with the singatures above that, so it is way too far to the right. Turns out, by the way, that if I use C-style /* */ comment delimiters rather than C++-style // ones, the indenting works better. Update: Oh my lord in heaven. This is killing me. If you use /* */ things work unless you hit enter twice, to have a blank line in your comments. When you do that, suddenly the indentation goes like way over to the left. Too far to the left. Argh!
• 48) I'm trying to save a workspace in VC++ and it tells me that the workspace file cannot be written to. It doesn't tell me what the damned file path and name is.
• 47) The VC++ Help / MSDN Library thing is killing me. I enter "wsawait" in the Search, and it tells me there are no topics that match. Bloody stooopid.
• 46) How come whenever I start VC++, the first time I use the File menu it takes like 3 or 4 seconds after I click on the "File" menu bar entry before the menu actually appears? What is so bloody hard about drawing a menu? Whatever.
• 45) And another thing... In VC++ when you do Find in Files (which, for some strange copy-editing reason, they call Find In Files), you may get results. Those results are shown with the path to the file the individual hit is in, followed by the text. Since the path tends to be long, the text you are interested in is off the right-hand edge. So you scroll over to see which text you are really interested in. When you find something, you double-click on it to bring up that text in a window... and then all of a sudden the results of the Find are redrawn from the far-left side of the results, which means you then have to scroll back over to the right to see the hits again. Stoooopid!
• 44) Man. Every time I explore some new functionality in some MS app, I end up discovering "A Whole New World of Suck! (tm)" Like, I've got a ton of windows open in VC++ and the ones I want are not available in the Window drop-down menu. So I go into the list-o-windows dialog and select the two that I want. The Activate button then gets disabled (apparently happens whenever you have more than 1 window selected), and if I hit OK then nothing happens; those windows that I wanted don't come to the front or anything. So what is the point of the bloody dialog in the first place then? I mean, if it was designed to be completely useless then why in the heck does it have so many buttons on it? God this stuff blows my mind.
• 43) Oh, sure, you can restrict replacing text to the selection in VC++, but you can't do that for finding text.
• 42) I get an assertion while running under the VC++ debugger. It says "blah blah blah press Retry to debug the application." So why not just label the damned button Debug instead, you shmucks? Oh, hey, and really it says "(Press Retry to debug the application)" which I think is funny, that they made it parenthetical.
• 41) I'm using VC++. I search for a string in the files of the project (well, really just some files in directories, but whatever). I find one I want, and I edit it. The file isn't checked out. It checks it out for me. It switches from the "Find in Files 1" tab of the output window to some other tab that is like nine hundred tabs away from the "Find in Files 1" tab. So then I have to use the suck-ass little scroll arrows to get back to the damned "Find in Files 1" tab. There isn't any way to speed it up, there isn't any scroll bar I can move, there aren't any obvious keys to hold down to modify how quickly it scrolls through the tabs... and then the kicker is that it doesn't even remember my vertical scroll position in the "Find in Files 1" tab contents when I finally get there and choose it. Okay, so who can I slap silly over this one?
• 40) Have I mentioned how much I love the fact that the Help in VC++ crashes the whole app like once a week? And that when the Help is searching, you can't do anything in the other windows? Why isn't the Help thing just a completely different app? Sheesh.
• 39) Wow. Just, like, wow. This happens in VC++ and I suspect it potentially happens in any Windows application with hierarchical menus. I hit Alt-f to get into the menu bar. I can use the left and right arrow keys to move from menu to menu (e.g.: File to Edit to View). However, in each of those menus the first entry is always hilighted. It isn't that my selection is at the name-of-the-menu level, it is actually the first thing in the currently active menu. So, if that first thing is itself a hierarchical entry then when I hit the right arrow... the sub menu appears, rather than moving me to the next top level menu! Grn.
• 38) Two files in the same project with similar code. For one of them, VC++ gives me no warnings. For the other, it tells me that a variable hasn't been set before passing it into a method. So what gives? Why isn't it warning me about that in the first file?
• 37) Is it me, or does VC++ completely not handle multi-line search & replace? Like, you have a block that you want to replace with another block. If it can do it, the UI sure isn't apparent. What a pathetic piece of junk.
• 36) VC++ will sometimes show you a list of choices when you hit F12 on a method name that is used in more than one class. It hilights the one it thinks you want, and it gets it right pretty often. The stooopid thing about it all is that the dialog it puts up to verify that it guessed correctly has the hilighted one generally just edging off the bottom of the list, so you can't read it. So you pretty much always have to scroll to check. Why didn't they just have it in the middle or at the top of the visible list? Sheesh.
• 35) This happens a lot: VC++ is set up to use source control (in this particular case, Perforce). I do some stuff with Perforce outside of VC++ (like sync to the latest version of everything) and then I go back to VC++ to do work. I click on some menu and then just as I'm about to pick the thing I want from the menu, VC++ decides to put up a dialog saying "hey, I noticed that some files have changed, do you want me to reaload them?" The kicker is that the dialog box appears beneath the pull-down menu I was working with, yet also steals all focus, and VC++ doesn't get rid of that pull-down. So I'm left facing: a menu on top that refuses to take any input, so there is no way to get rid of it, a dialog box beneath that with only part of the dialog box showing (so I can't even read what the dialog box is about, or what the buttons are - it is only because I've used VC++ enough that I know what it probably is), and which has stolen all focus and won't let me do anything else until I've told it what to go and do, and then the app window below the dialog box which obviously isn't getting any input. It's truely beautiful.
• 34) I'm in a file in VC++. I'm looking at a constant like 'WAIT_FOREVER'. I want to know what that constant's value is. So I hit F12 to try and get to wherever it is defined. Doesn't work (instead, I get shown where it is used as a default parameter value in a method). Nice. Yeah, that's so really just what I wanted it to do.
• 33) VC++ (and probably lots of other compilers, if not all) doesn't let you step into a virtual function table. I think I would have noticed that I was calling a pure virtual function a lot sooner if stepping into the call showed what happened in the vftable. I mean, the lookup is happening at run time, no? So shouldn't the debugger let me see that action? Sheesh.
• 32) I've got an enum. VC++ is nice enough to show me its name in the debugger. However, it refuses to show me its integer value. At all. It seems. Jerks.
• 31) Unix grep lets you get back just the matching file names, once. Like, if a file hits more than once, you only see the file name once. VC++'s Find in Files doesn't have that. Suck ass.
• 30) Is it me, or is setting a breakpoint in a for loop in VC++ just completely stupid and broken and wrong and dysfunctional? Like, I just want to put a breakpoint on the last thing in the loop, the incrementer. It seems to stop there whenever it goes through the for loop, like, even the first time, when the incrementer shouldn't be called at all. There's just seems to be no way to differentiate in VC++. Grrrrn.
• 29) So VC++ thinks, on the one hand, that I have a file checked out (there's a little red check mark next to the file name) but then when I go to edit it, it rings the bell and won't let me. So it apparently was smart enough to figure out that the file status changed, and that I'm not allowed to mess with it. So how about asking me if it should update it's source control status, since that is pretty much what I always want to do in this situation?
• 28) Controlling breakpoints in VC++ is a huge pain in the ass. The UI is completely stupid.
  1. If there is no breakpoint on the line, the menu entry reads "Insert/Remove Breakpoint" even though there is nothing to remove.
  2. If there is a breakpoint, and it is disabled, you again get the "Insert/Remove" which is again really stupid, and when you pick that it just turns the breakpoint back on. Only then can you remove it.
  3. The Build MiniBar has a button for "Inserting/Remove Breakpoint," but nothing for toggling it.
  4. (more strewn below)
• 27) How do I get VC++ to tell me what a key combination does? Like, I want to assign something but I don't know if it is already being used for something else. Suck!
• 26) Sure, VC++ has auto completion of things but it falls kinda short of orgasmic:
  1. It doesn't fill out the signature when you are writing the method in your .cpp file. It knows everything from the .h, it even shows it to you, but it refuses to just put that stuff in for you when you hit tab.
  2. If you have Foo() and FooBar(), you type F, hit tab and get Foo with no option of getting FooBar, as far as I can tell.
• 25) The "Find in Files" dialog in VC++ has a little pop up menu next to the text field that lets you add regular expression stuff to your search. The menu that comes up appears over the Find and Cancel buttons. When you click on the little tab that brings up the regex list, it doesn't make the list go away. It just redraws it. So you have to click somewhere else entirely to get the damned thing to go away so you can hit the Find button. Whatever.
• 24) Oh, the hate. VC++ has tabbed output windows, including the results of Find in Files operations and Build messages. Say you are going through and fixing up something that occurs in lots of files. You do your Find in Files and get the list of stuff. Then, you are trying to edit the files. Say the files are under source control; whe you go to make the edit, it brings up a dialog asking you if you want to check it out. When you check it out, it also switches the tabbed view to the Source Control output that shows what, e.g.: the Perforce server said. So now when you switch back to your Find in Files window, the cursor is no longer where you had it, like part way through the huge list of hits. No, now it is back at the top and you have to find where you were a second ago. This is rather frustrating.
• 23) VC++ apparently isn't so good about warning you when you use unsigned ints with signed ints. Nice.
• 22) VC++ says that an int declared inside a for statement is visible outside it. Uh, shyeah, whatever.
• 21) It bugs me that the debugger in VC++ doesn't show bool types as 'true' and 'false' but as '0x01' and '0x00'. Maybe I just dislike C++.
• 20) Since new/delete causes so much trouble when debugging (like, screwing up when you use new/delete is pretty common), how about letting me set a watch that says 'if memory XYZ is ever deleted, break!'? (Maybe you can, but I sure haven't figured out how.)
• 19) The Watch window in VC++ is stupid; you should have to double click to edit the contents of the Name so you can easily delete entries
• 18) The little windows in VC++ suck a lot of ass because they do not give you much room for viewing their contents, and they don't tend to wrap the text, and they don't tend to give you a horizontal scrollbar. So you have to futz around with resizing them just to see the data. I mean, what is the point in having a window for viewing data when it sucks so hard?
• 17) Once again, VC++ is killing me. I've got a linked list. The items inside it inherit from a CLinkable class. They have a single char as member data. When I look at the items in the debugger, part of the time it doesn't show me the member data. The whole point of the char was to give me something to more easily see what was going on for testing, but since this piece of excrement doesn't show me the data it doesn't do me much good, now does it? I assume the problem is that inside the routine, it is just a CLinkable rather than the subclass. But, the debugger is showing me that it knows it is really of the subclass type, but then it limits what it shows to the stuff defined in the superclas. Ugh.
• 16) So the Address/Memory window in VC++ lets you choose Byte, Short or Long hex format. However, if you just open a binary file and VC++ shows it to you as a hex dump, you do not have those options in that window.
• 15) VC++ command icons suck ass. There is an icon on a toolbar that means 'Build' and only does out-of-date files. There is another icon in the Build menu does 'Rebuild All' and hits all files. Unless you look really closely, these icons look pretty much exactly the same. Dumb ass crap, if you ask me. Remember, it should at least be the smallest significant difference.
• 14) Sometimes, you can toggle the hexidecimal display mode of the Context / Stack window in VC++, and have nothing change; everything stays in hex!
• 13) So the Address display in VC++ is - can you guess? - yes, a crock of crap. It always wants to put the address you enter into the middle of the display, so you can see the data around it, not just after it. (Actually, I'd like to point out that sometimes it just puts your address at the top of the dump rather than in the middle, and it appears to pretty randomly decide which to do.) Okay, that's fine, but it doesn't hilight your address in any way. So, then you can do some math in the Address field e.g.: 0x002f469e + 0x16, which works but: your address is again in the middle, with no hilight - so you'd have to do the math to figure out which address that equation works out to be, defeating the whole purpose of having the math in there in the first place.
• 12) You can undock some windows from VC++. But you cannot undock actual file windows. Like, so you could look at two documents side by side or, as I want, on two different monitors. Whatever.
• 11) My lord. Trying to set up conditional break points in VC++ is so completely stupid. Wow. Like, it is as if they designed it to be as far away from the right UI as possible. I'm pretty impressed!
• 10) The way you set and clear breakpoints in VC++ sucks a lot. Like, the menu item changes its text, and also what it does. And it is hard to see where you right-clicked sometimes, so you end up marking the line before or after the one you really wanted. Surely other people have noticed that the UI is kinda frustrating? I'd suggest letting me just click on the red spot to toggle its state or something nice and direct like that. I'm really hating the current right-clicking method.
• 9) Just trying to view some memory in VC++ sucks so much ass. I have a pointer, and I want to see a bunch of data from there on out. The regular Watch or Variables windows refuse to show me more than the first element. So I bring up the Memory window. Of course, I can't just drag a variable name onto that window to have it set the address there because that would be useful. Not to mention that the window just sucks because it doesn't even like remember the last few memory locations you entered into the Address field.
• 8) I wish VC++'s Find and Replace dialog had an option to replace just until the end of the file, rather than like me having to do it interactively so I stop it when it loops around, or me having to pre-select from a point on down to the bottom of the file. It is especially cool when VC++ decides not to scroll the window to show me where it has found a match. Like, it is merrily matching things but they are outside the current viewport. Normally, it scrolls so you can see what it found, but sometimes (maybe when you switch focus some?) it just bugs out. Piece o' crap. Oh, wait, I see what is happening: the things it found are underneath the dialog box so I can't see them. So Word solved the problem by actually moving the dialog box around which is pretty clearly the completely wrong thing to do: instead, the text should scroll so that I can see the match; so that it isn't hidden under the dialog box. These people, sheesh. Hey, wait! There's more! It looks like another problem is that if the window with the text in it loses focus, then it doesn't draw the selected text with the hilight background color. Sweet! So it is merrily matching, but I don't actually get to see anything. The mind boggles.
• 7) So pretty much whenever I hit the Execute Program toolbar button in VC++, it asks me if I want to build out-of-date files. Why isn't there a check box in that dialog saying "don't ever ask me this bloody question again?"
• 6) Boy, I sure am glad that VC++ doesn't seem to warn me about empty while statements. Yeah!
• 5) I left off the parenthases from the definition of a destructor once, and VC++ couldn't handle it at all:
  COMPILER ERROR
  (compiler file 'msc1.cpp', line 1794)
  Please choose the Technical Support command on the Visual C++
  Help menu, or open the Technical Support help file for more information
  Error executing cl.exe.
  I mean, it would be nice if it could notice something as silly as some missing parens and warn me about them, rather than just completely exploding.
• 4) When you have something like Foo* var; in VC++, and the cursor is over the 'v' in 'var' and you do Ctrl-backspace, I would expect it to just delete the space. Unfortunately, somebody decided it would be a good idea for it to also delete the '*' which just seems really wrong to me. (So, without the '*', it actually deletes the Foo... hm. I guess that makes sense. Maybe I wish that whitespace were treated as a word? But, like, four tabs in a row with some spaces after them would all be treated as a single chunk, so that would all get deleted at once if you did Ctrl-backspace.)
• 3) Hey, now this is impressive: VC++ has gotten itself all locked up, probably trying to do something with Perforce. So I bring up the Task Manager to see if it lists the application as not responding. Ha ha. It doesn't even list the application at all. Of course, there is no status from VC++. Eventually it came back (I was afraid of killing it - although I'm not sure how I would since it didn't appear in the application list, and I didn't see anything obvious in the processs list) but the entire time it did nothing to tell me "hey, don't kill me, I'm just waiting on Perforce." Whatever. Everything is a tub of crap.
• 2) I have a Workspace in Visual C++. The project has multiple folders under the Source Files and the Header Files sections. When I add files to the project from disk, it will put .h files into the top level Header Files section. The files actually belong in a sub folder (why it can't figure it out since it knows the path to the files I don't know) but it is okay because by putting them at the top level they are seperated from files already in the project. Of course, that is only because in this project we don't have any such top level files, so that is a stroke of luck. Unfortunately, .cpp files are being put, not into the top level Source Files, but into a sub folder. The kicker is that they are being put into the wrong bloody folder. So VC++ manages to screw things up in every possible way, and absolutely guarantees that it will not do the right thing. Incredible. Genius!
• 1) MS VC++ kinda sucks in some pretty dumb ways:
  1. It apparently cannot blink matching parens while you are typing.
  2. It apparently cannot warn you when you have if( x = NULL ) rather than if( x == NULL ).
  3. It has a Window list. There is no useful order to it, however. Maybe it is the order in which the files were opened, whatever, it is useless to me. It should be sorted alphabetically by the name of the file, not including the path. Then it would be useful.
  4. It takes whatever word the cursor is in and puts that in the text field. And there is no way that I can find to turn it off.
  5. So I know there is a keyboard shortcut for Find Next. So why the hell isn't it shown when I right click on the Find Next button and choose "What's this?" Where the hell do I have to go to find out what the obscure shortcuts are? So I look for Help, and find "Finding Text in a Single File / To start a find without using the Find dialog box" which goes on to never mention keyboard shortcuts:
     • Type or select a search string in the Find box on the Standard toolbar, and press ENTER.
     Note You can use regular expressions with the Find box on the Standard toolbar if you have previously selected the Regular expression check box in the Find dialog box.
     So then, it goes on to talk about the Keyboard Map, which should show you what commands use what key combinations. Of course, it expects you to know what the internal command name is, and lists all the whacky commands that exist, alphabetically, for a given menu. This is just too far removed from how a user has experienced the commands, namely getting to them via menus, which is exactly the interface they should have for finding out what the blasted shortcuts are, like I wanted in the first place.
  6. This is awesome! The MSDN Library interface gives you a Search. The window is split vertically into two frames. The results of a search are given in the left frame, in a window that has columns like Title, Location, etc. If the frame split is such that the search results window is narrow, the vertical scrollbar goes away.
  7. Say someone has put a bunch of classes in a single file. I want Visual C++ to give me a way of browsing those classes. I don't want to see all the other classes from all the other files in the project. How the hell do I do that?
  8. If you are doing a Find in files in VC++ and you hit the Esc key, it doesn't stop the search. Instead, it just hides the output window. Brilliant.
  9. The Breakpoints command is under (get this) the Edit menu, not something more obvious like the View / Debug menu entry... Where everything else like that is kept.
  10. The memory viewer in Visual C++ doesn't have a base 10 (or base 8) mode?!
  11. In Visual C++, you can have a window with a scrollbar and stuff in it. If the last thing in the window is wider than the window and you mose over it, a tooltip type thing comes up to show you the full text. The kicker is that the text overlaps the down button on the scrollbar, and you can't click on it! You have to wait until the tooltip goes away.