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Visual Studio SP1 woes
If it ain’t broke don’t fix it23 December 2006
by Dermot Hogan
“It’s better to have known bugs rather than unknown fixes”. It’s a motto that’s served me well over the years, and it applies particularly to software ‘fix packs’ or ‘service packs’. Well, I broke the rule yesterday and installed Visual Studio SP1. And I’m now re-installing Visual Studio from scratch as I write this. It’s nobody’s fault but mine, and, yes, Microsoft’s.
The problem I’ve got is that the debugger no longer functions as it once did. I used to be able to hover over a variable and ‘drill down’ into it. Now I get the message “Function evaluation disabled because a previous function evaluation timed out” all over the place and once I step with F10, Visual Studio disappears into a black hole, from which I can’t recover. Whatever the cause (these are pretty complicated variables: generic lists of dictionaries of sorted lists – that sort of thing), this did NOT happen with the original Visual Studio installation. Unfortunately, this is vital for my debugging and I can’t really live without it. So bye-bye SP1.
That’s not the only problem with SP1. I started installing it at lunchtime yesterday. I was still at it in the evening. Not only is SP1 vast – over 440MB – its installation is primitive. I was asked three times if I wanted to install a particular product at different stages in the installation. Of course, I’d gone out for a walk, painted the house, watched the paint dry in the meantime and not realised that SP1 was waiting for an answer. I’d have thought that it might have been an idea to present a summary screen at the start of the process and go from there. Apparently not. Even so, each stage seems to count the bits on your hard disk and then cross-checks the result. What on earth was it doing? Beats me.
Further, the SP1 installation process lies. It has a cheery little progress bar giving the expected time to complete the installation. I happily sat and watched it report zero minutes to completion. For over half-an-hour. More than once, more fool me.
I’m reluctant to throw rocks at Microsoft’s Visual Studio developers. I’ll be in a similar situation shortly – we’re releasing a Ruby IDE Ruby In Steel soon and I’m pretty sure I’ll have let some bloopers out of the door in the process. It’s just the nature of software.
Still, it doesn’t stop me feeling annoyed with Microsoft. At the end of this little saga, I’ll have wasted the best part of a day from my precious release schedule with nothing to show for it.
But the person I’m most annoyed with is myself. For breaking the golden rule: “if it ain’t broke – don’t fix it”.
Bah. Humbug. Merry Christmas to one and all.