I’d like to share a personal experience, if I may. I’ve been working with Visual Studio for absolute ages, since about Version 5 (which I think was called 97, but I can’t be sure). And while VS by itself was and is becoming more and more powerful with every release, I have to point out a (well-known) flaw that weighs heavily against its continuous use.

Visual Studio is slow.

Now, now, don’t argue. It’s unfortunate, but it’s true: beleive me, I’ve been running VS from RAM and it’s still slow. What do I mean by ‘slow’, then? Well, the fact that when I work in SharpDevelop, things just fly. I type quickly, nothing lags, compilation is a breeze. But in VS, I feel like there’s a demon standing beside me, waiting to slap me the moment I get to any serious level of productivity.

Now, the problem in VS2010 has been exacerbated, of course. 2008 is already pretty slow, especially with all the bells and whistles, but 2010 uses WPF for its UI and – I don’t know, maybe it’s just me – but my peception from the betas is that the extra goodness of all those nice shiny buttons is negated by the fact that I can’t get my code quickly.

One can open a philosophical can of worms here about what productivity means, but my intinct tells me that the undamental goal of software development is to write good code, quickly. And for that you need

  • A text editor
  • A compiler
  • A good debugger

If it weren’t for debugging, you can bet I’d be using other IDEs most of the time because what concerns me is how fast my ideas turn to code. But regardless of it all, I am of course anxious to see VS2010 released and in action. I’m betting that potential clients would also want to see it, and not 2008, on our machines in future, and for us 2010 will be a staplemark of progress as much as anything else.

We’ll just have to wait and see.