I was, at one point, a big fan of the Visual Studio Environment. Yesterday, my appreciation of it was crushed — perhaps permanently.
See, every once in a while, I’ll get the urge to program something. Yesterday, I went to start up a new WPF project in C# Express. I wanted to code myself a little forecast/weather grabber from the NOAA NDFD Forecast Soap Service which I had experimented with before. So I added the service to the project and had Visual C# generate the code, as has been the way for a long time.
Lo’ and behold: it didn’t work.
Turns out that the service didn’t specify an encoding or didn’t encode properly. C# wants everything to be UTF-8 or UTF-16, and dies thusly. It wasn’t dying or throwing a warning about the encoding while generating the code, or even instantiating the service, but only when data was recieved after the method call. Turns out, the way to handle encodings other than UTF-* is so unbelivably complicated that I don’t care to do it, especially when specifying the encoding could easily be an option when generating the code.
So while I’m debugging this project and trying to get it to work, a “Help Update” dialog pops up and prevents me from doing anything. I try to stop the debugger at least, so this update can complete and VS tells me that it’s waiting for the update to complete. Ok… so I wait. And wait…wait and wait and wait… nothing. According to Task Manager, this update is burning up 100% of my cpu, so I get mad and terminate the process. It takes me two or three times of terminating the process before I can actually get it to die and get control of VS back. As I stop the debugger and prepare to close the IDE, the update dialog comes back, continues to burn up my cpu and my patience.
“Something must be messed up,” I think. So I repair the MSDN install. It comes back. I repair C# Express. It comes back. I uninstall MSDN, effectively removing what needed the update (or so I thought), and it COMES BACK! I uninstall C# Express and the problem goes away :)
So I’m done with Visual C# Express for a while and my high opinion of the MS development tools is shattered. It’s a shame too — I had high hopes for XNA.
Oh yeah, my computer at home is kind of shot and I can’t afford to get a new one. So this site will probably go unmaintained for a bit.