Oliver’s Place

Sometimes I can’t help but getting nostalgic when I think about the old days when Microsoft Visual Studio was the benchmark for Integrated Development Environments. Back then when I used Visual C++ 2.0 the first time, I immediately fell in love with it. The IDE ran under Windows NT (I refused to use Windows 3.1 and 95 for anything productive), had an excellent editor and kick-ass debugger, was fast, and just did what it was supposed to do without getting in my way. The following releases improved on that foundation and introduced features such as IntelliSense, incremental Compilation and minimal Rebuild. Everything was good in Developer Land.

Unfortunately, all of that ended with the release of Visual Studio .Net 2002. This was the first release which introduced support for the .Net Framework in the IDE. Don’t get me wrong. I still regard the .Net Framework as one of Microsoft’s better products, but this post is about Visual Studio and the impact the framework plus other contributing factors had on the quality of IDE.  Visual Studio .Net 2002 took approximately two hours to install on my relatively powerful workstation. After that, when I was allowed to launch the IDE, the greatly increased startup time was immediately noticeable. But hey that’s the price you got to pay for all those shiny new features right?

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