Visual Studio .Net 2003 getting very flaky

[a_unique_person]

I am writing some software, not a giant application, but getting more and more complex by the day. The thing that is giving me the sh*** is the war VS breaks down when you push it. Intellisense is great, till it stops working. Multiple projects that can be added as references are great, till the reference is changed, then the program doesn't work.

User forms that can be created quite easily, but then disappear of the form you put them on. Goddam, just annoying, but also a huge waste of time.

[Iconoclast]

Originally posted by a_unique_person
I am writing some software, not a giant application, but getting more and more complex by the day. The thing that is giving me the sh*** is the war VS breaks down when you push it.What do you mean "breaks down"? You shouldn't be getting any weird behaviour even with 100 projects in your solution, and 1,000 source files. Whidbey has been tested with 1,000 Projects in a solution which is pretty amazing.

Originally posted by a_unique_person
Intellisense is great, till it stops working.Does it really stop working or does it just fail with certain classes? I've found intellisense sometimes can't iterate the members of a typed DataRow in a generated class, and I believe this bug is fixed in Whidbey.

Very, very occasionally, when intellisense attempts to display the members of a function it will get into an infinite loop and hang Visual Studio, but such occasions are rare and completely repeatable. I think this has only happened to me twice since I've been using VS.NET, so that's not too bad. Overall I've found the product to be extremely stable, and this is with very large projects.

Originally posted by a_unique_person
Multiple projects that can be added as references are great, till the reference is changed, then the program doesn't work.You mean the program doesn't compile, right? What do you mean by "till the reference is changed"? Obviously, if you change the ref path so it's pointing to the wrong directory VS won't be able to find the assembly. Similarly, if you move the referenced project without updating the ref path VS won't be able to find it then either.

Originally posted by a_unique_person
User forms that can be created quite easily, but then disappear of the form you put them on.User forms? Do you mean "Forms" or "User Controls"? I don't beleive I've ever seen controls disappearing from my forms. This can (and will) happen if you incorrectly make manual changes to the InitializeComponent method of your form... the method that says at the top of it "do not modify the contents of this method with the code editor".

[a_unique_person]

I even managed to get the compiler to throw an internal error. There was a coding error, but rather than just pointing out my mistake, all it did was issue an error message, and the spit the dummy about the general area of code the error was in.

The project that is referenced is recompiled only, the details of the reference are not being changed. However, a form that has code that uses the datasets created by that project refuses to load. I have not touched the 'don't touch this' code. The weird thing is that, without changing anything, the form will then load normally.

[a_unique_person]

I have gone over various whingers like me, and put all the projects in the one solution, moved the root directory for the project closer to the root of the disk, so the file path lengths aren't so long.

But when I go to do a rebuild compile, I get this "A failure occurred while attempting to start the compilation."

The MSDN web site has this useful message.



Visual Basic and Visual C# Reference

A failure occurred while attempting to start the compilation
An unknown error has been encountered while issuing the Start Build request to the Visual Basic or Visual C# compiler.

To correct this error

Restart Visual Studio.
This error will cause the build process to fail.



There can also be other messages about not being able to write the .pdb file, because another program has it locked, but VS is the only program that is using it. goddam.