Things that annoy me about Visual Studio #1

[andrewducker]

The solution at work has 11 projects in it.

Even if the compilation on the very first project fails, it continues to compile all of the other ones.

Why, oh why, would I want to compile projects that are dependent on one that failed to compile?

Comments

[crm.livejournal.com]

i think its fundimentally squiffey to call it a 'solution' if it dosent work :P

[asim.livejournal.com]

The list of things that Visual Studio sucks at...oi.

At some point, you likely need nAnt or the like to really do the job right. W0onder if Maven's been ported?

[andrewducker]

We use Nant for hourly check-builds (downloads the files from CVS, builds it, runs unit tests, etc.).

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

One for the ever-growing file of "things that Microsoft products don't do right that were solved problems in the 1980s Unix world".

[andrewducker]

Yup.

Although if I wanted to do it the Unix way I could write my own build scripts - which would work just fine.

[call-waiting.livejournal.com]

I had such a hard time believing that VC gets this wrong (after all, our IDDE actually gets it right) that I actually rebooted to Windows to try it out. I'm shocked and scared -- presumably it'll 'successfully' build the dependant projects using stale build products from old builds of the prerequisite projects. Dangerous stuff.

Handwriting makefiles has always seemed about as easy as managing projects with an IDDE, the only difference being you have to actually type them in.

I'm not going to mention the existence of autoconf, autoproj et al because, frankly, I'm ashamed that such a system has become the 'standard' for Unix applications. When the best thing I can think to say about a system is 'Well, at least you don't have to hand-edit XML', you know I'm struggling. I'd still rather use autoconf than a build system that makes me type XML, though. It's a political thing.

Actually, the best thing about autoconf is that it works. The second best thing is that you don't have to type XML. The third best thing about it is that you don't have to type it at all if you use Anjuta to build the scripts for you...

[andrewducker]

I would just use scripts (probably NANT), if it wasn't that the IDE depends on various files being copied to the right places as part of the build process, so that debugging can work properly.