Broken Tools

Nothin' in the world like a good rant...or a bad one. If you're squeamish, you might want to look away.

To go with the 360 we use VS2K5 as is required by Microsoft. Since then I've noticed the following things that are broken which annoy the bejeezus out of me:

Bookmarks will sometimes persist even when I remove them even through reloads/reboots, often in completely incorrect places.

Go To Definition often does not function properly. Going to the declaration of the pure virtual method is not what I want! It used to give a list to resolve ambiguities; I'm not sure why that's not proper now.

It will randomly reset all my keyboard settings. I'm very particular about these and rather than reset them (sometimes every 10 minutes) I've accepted the loss in productivity vs. using the annoyingly user-hostile keyboard configuration dialogs to reset them yet again. The annoyance is especially apparent when I go home and work there where VC6 suffers no such issues!

It will randomly reset my toolbars. This would not be such a problem if my custom one was saved. I gladly heralded the return of the Pop Context widget but I end up having to hunt for it in the mess of other widgets to rebuild that toolbar on a semi-weekly basis.

Breakpoints will often be randomly added, sometimes in illegal places. I can't get these to go away except by removing all breakpoints in the project--some of which I actually need. Merely disabling them does not work reliably. This is especially irritating when it halts program execution or crashes because the bookmark is in a Bad Place (TM).

If I ever stop compilation to fix an error (can't save a file in the project during compilation and our project can take up to 10 minutes) I have to do a full build--it will corrupt the intermediate build files in non-obvious ways and I'll end up trying to track down an obscure bug that doesn't really exist.

I have a dual head system at work and I put some of my windows on a different monitor. The program will sometimes randomly move those windows around between runs, between starts, and sometimes even when I get back to work in the morning. I spend a ridiculous amount of time re-positioning and re-adding tabs.

It is extremely unstable. It will often take 10-30 minutes to crash even if I kill it from the task manager. My days tend to not be productive anyway because of poor workflow and environmental concerns but this is clearly not helping.

Some of these may have solutions but I sure as all hell can't find them (and yes, I've looked quite extensively). The IDE is a tool that I rely on to do my job. Developers tend to be NOT HAPPY when it doesn't work a lot of the time.

Along the same lines, we recently upgraded to IE7 for security reasons. IE7 is far less mission critical for what I do but still has the annoying habit of completely losing some of my bookmarks! They're not 100% lost--oh no, that would be far too easy. They're still there in my favorites list with the correct name and everything. They just have completely lost the URL they were charged with safeguarding.

I've got dozens of places that I go to look for stuff and I often can't remember all the URLs--I'm old, it happens. If only we had the tools and technology to keep a proper list of URLs inside our browsers!