Thursday, October 18, 2007

Couple of things I miss from Visual C# Express

I know this great little application is free and so can't really complain, when you work with Visual Studio 2005 Professional five days a week the bits that are missing start to get to you:

  1. No "delete all breakpoints" option.
  2. Can't attach the debugger to another process, or set the project to load a different application
Doesn't sound like much, and I didn't think that was much, until you step through an XNA project, and then have to manually remove all your breakpoints. Or if you want to unit test something and you can't attach to the NUnit process, which means you can't step through your tests.

Glad it's got Intellisense though :)

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

You mean "Intellislow"?
Seriously, the lack of Attach to Process is just ridiculous. I've lost count how many times an ASP.Net web app has suddenly lost the ability to hit breakpoints & the only fix is to reattach the debugger (or restart and spend an indeterminate amount of time bringing your app back to the state where ASP flaked out). And try playing around with a Windows Service without the ability to debug (you have to attach to the process to do this, too).
Trying to get up to speed with the new 3.5 features on a converted project is futile to a great extent because whomever at MS in charge of the feature matrix decided to be obsessive-compulsive with the list and apply an obscene amount of granularity.
(Disclaimer: Today's a "crap on MS" day due to general Vista junk, this stuff with Express, my PocketPC phone going haywire & crashing, and the MSDN Forums having a months-old issue with sign-ins...my vocabulary for the last 3 hours has consisted of a string of profanities followed by "MICROSOFT!")

Ian Dykes said...

I've never had any problems with the speed of Intellisense myself. On all of the recent Visual Studio products I've used it's been fine: express versions included. Actually I have noticed that it's slower in VB.Net, but I use C# pretty much all of the time.

Attaching the debugger to a process does seem to be an oversight though. Debugging a service, or (in my case) attaching to NUnit is something I'm so used to being able to do I simply can't fathom not being able to do it in the express version.

But this is free software...

paqogomez said...

You can delete the .SUO file of your solution. That'll get rid of all your breakpoints. It'll also get rid of all of your settings like files you have open and such.