With my problems with Vista I have to wonder when the world will grind to a halt. I realise it is a very pessimistic view and I know it won't happen, because it will probably just cause more hardware churn (the buying of new hardware). Those that know what they are doing with computers though will still plough their own furrow with well designed solutions.
The problem I am getting to though is Visual Studio 2005. Initially we were really impressed with it, you can look inside of arrays and it allowed settings to be exported and automated. Unfortunately months down the line I think it must suffer from digital entropy. The .vssettings files seem to rarely work now even though there is nothing to suggest why the settings will not take. The bscmake.exe continually fails, sometimes with an out of memory exception. The incremental linking can sometimes take over 20 minutes for a simple one file change. The STL is simply too slow if you rely on the speed of the STL operation. The Intellisense update can cause the UI to freeze up and it rarely builds the symbols correctly meaning you can be left with no tooltips. VS2005 uses masses more memory and gradually slows down.
The thing was when we installed it, there was definitely a lot of bonuses, but after having to use it for a few months it becomes incredibly difficult to defend it. I think the IDE is now geared towards CLI/.NET development so it probably works seamlessly for that, but for C++ only it seems to be lacking and going backwards in some instances by forcing some "secure" programming on you.
Unfortunately it is still the best IDE for developing on Windows and there is very little to touch it. Maybe in the future something like Code::Blocks or Eclipse could catch it, but it will probably always be ahead.
