Dear Visual Studio team…

[This is my only post in English so far, probably more NOT to come]

Dear Visual Studio team, you OWN me. I spend ~40% of my entire life sitting in front of your product. I’ve been using VS since ver. 6.0. I switched from 2008 to 2010 a month ago. I make money with it. I have fun with it. It’s like a best friend, that… that stabs me in my back far too often.

You own me, but you OWE me too.

Sure, VS is prettier now. It is more powerful than ever. It’s more mature. But so is my PC, and yet sometimes it has serious problems with your sweet baby. I try to feed it really well. It has a dedicated VMWare virtual machine with 4 GB of RAM, 4 cores, separate physical HDD, but it’s still hungry! I feel like I’m stuck. I even considered buying a 160GB SSD to make it happy. But then again – should I really spend so much money on making Visual Studio happy? Even my girlfriend doesn’t get such expensive gifts that often. Moreover, I’m not sure if I *should* spoil it that much. It’s starting to become that fat monster-chick that noone wants to take to the prom (I mean – VS, not my girlfriend:)). I always thought that each new version of software should perform better than the last one. Well, it’s not the case here. VS is slower and slower and slower with every release. Will I need to buy a machine from NASA to run VS 2025?

And what with this “Visual Studio needs to close” message? VS is not 2 years old any more to say “baby needs to poop“. Why should I care that it needs to close? If you have problem – deal with it, but don’t distract me. You need to close while I need to work, goddamnit! Please, let me.

What irritates me the most with the whole “closing” thing is that it completely forgets what I taught it before. I set up my environment exaclty how I want it to be. I spent lots of time in this horrible, horrible “Tools -> Customize” window. At last VS whispered to me “now I know how you like it, baby, let’s do it“. And we jumped right into a wonderful coding session.

It was wonderful until I saw that VS needs to close. Then I reopened it. Then I reopened my solution (and waited for it to load). Then I started coding again, and then I roared. VS guys, can you hear me roar?? This stupid sack of 0s and 1s completely forgot all my settings! I had to go to the horrible, HORRIBLE “Tools -> Customize” window again. And waste lots of time to re-customize it. You STOLE that time from me, VS team, I mean it. Finally I figured out that (ironically) VS needs to close to save my settings.

I wrote that VS is more mature and powerful than it used to be. By “more mature and powerful” I mean: it has more features. Some of them are cool, but in my opinion you should really spend more time IMPROVING what you already have, not adding new stuff on top of this. Isn’t this the most basic rule of all times? “Build solid core, and add stuff on top of it”? During MVP Summit 2009 we were asked “what do you expect from Visual Studio vNext?“. Almost all MVPs replied “we expect it to be faster and more reliable“. Next question: “would you rather see new features or increased stability?“. We replied without hesitation: “increased stability!“. And what we got? Well, it’s not stability, and it’s not performance, that’s for sure.

Please, don’t spend time on some new diagrams, we have NDepend just for that. Please, don’t spend time on more “Navigate to” commands, we have Resharper just for that. You created a great extensibility model – let other people do the “shiny” stuff. Please, focus on delivering a fast, stable IDE that we, developers, can be truly passionate about. Please, concentrate on making the CORE perfect and let plugin vendors expose it’s internal beauty. Don’t compete with them, help them.

And finally, for the last time: please, simply let me do my job.

Maciej Aniserowicz, C# MVP, freelancer, irritated C# dev