@Rourke that’s a classic “straw man” argument, you know? We complain about VS updates, and you counter that Windows Update is terrible. Awesome point.
It is hard to argue, I think, that having a big, powerful, IDE that does “everything” is not convenient. It certainly is. As I have said many times before, I am totally addicted to ReSharper for C++ and my code is better for it.
But I’m sick to death of the constant updates, of never being able to count on the behavior or usability of the strange, obscure, and annoying pile that is Code Analysis, and the random breakage of vital components in my tool chain. I’m tired of the constant regressions in the IDE, where parsing breaks, chroma-coding fails, or some weird situation or another requires that I exit and restart the IDE for a given Solution.
I don’t like building my drivers with arbitrary, ever changing, versions of the compiler… a version which is not the same one that was used to build the operating system. I don’t like headers and libs that are “shared” changing arbitrarily.
The WDK is saddled with this mess, and trying to get what should be little things fixed requires negotiation with the behemoth that is “the people who own VS.”
Having tried vscode, the only things I can say in its favor are it’s extensible, and it’s not vim.
In short, I think MSFT has fucked-up VS and CA… making it all things to all people but not really ever fully working for any one use. And the WDK get layered, like peanut butter, on top of this pile. And it makes it hard for me to get my work done.
Is the VS editor, with ReSharper, better than CodeWright or SlickEdit (what I used to use before VS)? Tough call, but probably. Does that make it a joy to use on a daily basis? Not even close.
Peter