For large projects visual studio 2005 performs pretty poorly. Intellisense locks up, searches takes forever. Everything breaks down. Luckily the VS team at MS has a patch available here, this has many improvements for Visual C++ and speeds it up quite a bit. It’s a nice hotfix I recommend if you’re doing any Visual Studio development.
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Isn’t Visual Studio supported by Microsoft Update? Would the update be located there?
I always wonder if I should manually search Microsoft’s site for some hotfixes that might not be on Microsoft Update.
Actually as far sa I can tell Visual Studio isn’t covered by Microsoft update. What version of 2005 are you running? You should at least have SP1 and there are a couple of hotfixes to SP1 available from MS. As far as I know the hotfix I’ve linked here isn’t directly available at Microsoft.com.
At last they don’t make it easy to find.
I’m still running VS2003 from what I got in college. I’m annoyed that MS doesn’t put all of it’s products on Microsoft Update, they just have Windows and Office on it to my knowledge.
Yeah Microsoft update is really office/windows oriented. 2005 is actually a decent improvement over 2005. 2008 just came out. If you go to a launch event you can score yourself a free copy, along with server 2008 and SQL server 2008. See http://www.microsoft.com/heroeshappenhere/register/default.mspx.
You might also want to try the free “express” editions of the newer Visual Studio. They have most of the features you’d probably want.
Visual Studio is a POS. This intellisense shit keeps locking up for 5 min and the update and continue is broke half the time. Not to mention that doing searches in the help returns more VB/ASP bullshit than C++ even with the C++ filter on. I’m currently waiting for VS to come back so I don’t lose my unsaved work. Visual Studio is ASS!!!
So Mr Visual Studios, you’re right. It has it’s issues. The hotfix I linked in this post fixes some of the intellisense performance issues. Even so it does run like a dog on my system.
Thing is it’s STILL much better than most other debuggers? What would you propose to use instead? GDB? DDD? They don’t even have support for edit and continue. That’s a pretty advanced feature (you’re recompiling and patching code into something already running).
Even most other editors don’t pull off intellisense very well. So I’m not sure what you propose is better. Yeah VS has it’s issues (slow/bloated) but overall it has a cleaner and easier to use interface than most other C++ IDEs.
Come back and complain after you’re debugging a simulator in ddd/gdb on linux and tell me it still sucks.
Visual Studio is the devil itself. Slow builds, intellisense hangs the whole system, switch from Debug to Release in large projects takes about 5 minutes to occur and I think that the only reason we still use it under windows is because there is nothing better.
Or at least there was not until code::blocks came out. free, open, friendly, fast, still needs some work in the UI but still is dominant over VS which is more of a C# tool nowadays than C++. At least microsoft pushes it that way (see VS2008).
Anyway i am trying the hotfix and moving on.