Some ideas on how useful Visual Studio 2005 is to our team, has been brewing up in my mind for the last couple of days, and I was just trying to organize my thoughts to post about it, but with what happened today, I think a negative post would be on top of my list for now.
Since this morning, I had been experiencing problems with Visual Studio 2005 and I just can’t seem to figure out what went wrong. I’m not a big fan of Microsoft products but since my company is, I have no choice but to use whatever Microsoft tool they provide me. One of those tools is VS 2005 and I think we really have no choice since it provides much of the needed environment for VB or C# development including team collaboration using the Team Foundation System. Well, to cut the long story short, VS 2005 had been crashing on me the whole day. It’s really kinda weird since I tried restarting my machine, and killing all the applications that runs on my workstation, but still it crashes each time I load my team project, or change the build configuration. There were error prompts or debug options that showed up, but as if those weird mix up of characters and numbers would be helpful. These annoying crashes really wasted most of my time, and it was only late this afternoon that I gave up and started looking for other options to create builds.
As a Linux guy, I had been used to working on terminal mode and command lines. Maybe that’s one of the things I like most with Linux/UNIX.. you don’t need a GUI to get things done. I’m glad though that VS 2005 offer command line tools as well such as tf, msbuild, devenv, etc.. Moreover, I was able to download and install the VS 2005 Power Toys which added more command line tools that are very useful to me. So I just tried downloading our team project source code from our Team Foundation Server and started compiling things, using the DOS prompt. I also did a couple of BAT files to automate things for now instead of having to right the same commands several times. It’s good that I still remember most of the useful DOS Commands which I haven’t really used for quite some time. 
Funny thing is, my colleagues were both surprised and amazed on how I was able to work with the builds using only command lines. They were even more puzzled on how I was able to come up with a complete package without having to open VS 2005 and most of all in an automated way. Oh well, I just told them that GUI isn’t everything and not having it shouldn’t cripple you from your tasks. There are a lot of options if you only know where to look.
Oh well, I just hope things would be ok with VS 2005 tomorrow. Oh by the way, another weird thing that happened is that VS 2005 didn’t crash when I tried connecting to my workstation’s desktop from home (remotely). I was able to work properly over the remote connection. Isn’t that weird? It’s like VS 2005 saying to me, that I could be more productive if I work from home instead of in front of my PC. 
[tags]Visual Studio 2005, Microsoft, Team Foundation Server, Team Foundation System, DOS, Command Lines, Linux, UNIX, GUI[/tags]
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