Bah! Is it just me, or is Visual Studio 2005 really riddled with holes? I’m finding intermittent behavioral glitches, miscellaneous small errors, and occasional usability nightmares that just weren’t there in the beta. By the end of my first day with the new Studio, it had driven me to the very edge of sanity. To put it mildly, I was more than slightly frustrated.
The culminating event was when it started switching keyboard focus to the error window for each keystroke in the code window. Now, there is a mechanism that checks your code for errors as you type. This is a good thing but it’s slightly dumb in that it detects a “Semicolon Expected” error for each keystroke on a line until you actually put in the semicolon. This is technically true, of course, and was only a slight nit-picky gripe of mine until it started stealing my focus...on each keystroke! I still have no idea why this started happening but I can tell you it was not pleasant. I had to restart the environment to get it fixed and, thankfully, it hasn’t happened again. More recently, the compiler is only intermittently generating “is assigned but its value is never used” warnings for unused private fields. Well, actually, it seems to be only generating the warning on the first build after a change to the code. If you build again, the warning goes away until you make a change to the code and rebuild. Again, this is a just a little nit-picky thing but I still find it annoying. Well, at least they fixed that stupid bold/not-bold error with the “Parameter Info” intelli-sense.