Visual Studio RTM: More Bugs You Wouldn't Expect Given the Effort

Further to the previous post, I have drained away 18 hours of life trying to pinpoint a large array of editor issues. The latest one is the closest I have got to an actual target where the error is occurring. (It faults fpeditax.dll and blows the entire development environment off its wheels; and again I wasted some time filing the bug.)

I find this a depressing post, because I was looking forward to using VS 2010 for a new project, but based upon the last four days of almost constant aggravation, I have to say that I may be rolling back the install and fishing my away back to VS 2008, which while not as powerful in many regards is definitely more stable.

What happened with this error, the first where the IDE crashed with some actual explanation, was the following:

1. I opened an ASPX page;
2. I dragged an AJAX control element to the page (this also can happen with a standard ASPX button, etc.);
3. I realised I had dragged the wrong one (I hardly ever use the designer view);
4. I deleted the control bys electing and pressing the delete key;
5. I switched to Source View;
6. I noticed the editor looked “funky” (borders got a few pixels wider);
7. I clicked the Design view button just to see if the display quirk remained;
8. The IDE window refused to switch to Design view, grinding on the request, and eventually just remaining there and ignoring the request;
9. I closed the document;
10. I reopened the document;
11. The IDE faulted in the fpeditax.dll library (FrontPage Editor!), crashing the entire IDE.

Now, I did some research and found that users of Expression Blend have experienced this problem for a while, with no fix in sight. So, apparently, knowing about the issue, it was considered wise to toss that library at hardcore developers?

The most frustrating aspect of this new IDE is that its promise (strong and obvious) is killed outright by this kind of behavioural failure.

In addition to the issues reported in the previous post (after a 100% rebuild of the machine), I can add the following:

• Occasionally pasting to any document window will simply fail to paste;
• Typing text at the top of an existing CSS document (style sheet) will, when you save, lose everything you typed (more frequent if you type a single line than multiple ones, and when you type a line and hit the Enter key, the empty line will always act as a buffer and you only lose the first line).
• Adding items to the toolbox, and saving the project, etc., does not guarantee the items remain in the toolbox; and if they do you cannot actually be certain they will function next time you use them.
• Editing a document (code of any kind) can result in a crash if you select by clicking to thee far left of the margin region when word wrap is on.

There are about fifteen other ones I’m too tired to write out, and I’m certainly not filing them all as bugs given the fact most of them are intermittent and aren’t leaving a trail to find the actual crash module. Strangely, too, they got significantly worse in number after a clean install.

A sad, sad day for Visual Studio on my development boxes.