Visual Studio 2008 SP1 Bugs

Problem

Examine some improvements in Visual Studio 2008 SP1. I am among the many developers who are frustrated with some bugs in Visual Studio 2008 RTM (release-to-market). Mainly my problems were in ASP.NET, and many of them involved poor code formatting, very slow performance for refactoring, and overall sluggishness.

Solution

This article details my reaction and impression of the fixes in Visual Studio 2008 SP1. This service pack beta was first released in June 2008, and I tested it out within a week. I feel it does enhance Visual Studio 2008 substantially. Unlike the teams at Microsoft, who actually have to code and plan SP1, all I did was download it and install it.

Formatting

Several parts of the IntelliSense and AutoComplete features in Visual Studio 2008 SP1 are improved. The fixes involve CSS, JavaScript, and also HTML. When the application responds faster than it has ever responded before, I can't help but be happy with the new software.

• CSS improvements
  The CSS formatting bugfixes are perhaps the most important to me in this service pack. CSS whitespace when pasting code is now correct and far better. Before, when I pasted CSS the selection would change, and things would move strangely and I would worry that something was messed up (it wasn't).
• JavaScript tabs and margins
  This is more nebulous to me, but basically my observation is that the code formatting in JavaScript is better. Before, the margin indentations would be lost or not properly continued on the next line. The editor is more consistent now.
• HTML Format Selection
  My impression with Format Selection is that it is faster. (As a reminder, this feature can clean up line length and tag indentation and you can use it by right-clicking.) Not any big functional changes, but the annoying "freeze" is less common (or absent).

Performance

Speed is a passion of mine (on computers only). Scott Guthrie notes that the CLR is faster to start up when a Windows Forms program is first run. Unfortunately, I couldn't measure any changes, but the programs I develop are not slow to start up at all. Here are some of the cool things they do at MS.

• From Scott Guthrie:
  "Much of these gains were achieved by changing the layout of blocks within CLR NGEN images, and by significantly optimizing disk IO access patterns.
  ... We are today measuring up to 40% faster application startup improvements for large .NET client applications with SP1 installed."
• Client Profile Setup
  The .NET Framework is expansive and very powerful, but sometimes overkill. The required download to get .NET up and running is going to be under 30 MB, a substantial improvement. It doesn't install ASP.NET, which makes perfect sense.
• Client Setup experience
  I deployed a .NET client profile setup Windows Forms application already, and people installed it with no significant issues, even those who didn't have the .NET framework already installed.
• HTML formatting
  As I noted in the Formatting section, this is much faster and responsive. In fact it feels like I got an entirely new computer when I use this and it finishes in a small fraction of a second. Under 100 ms is considered instant, and this is instant.

Refactoring

This seems substantially improved for ASP.NET projects. I complained about this problem in my review of Visual Studio 2008, but I have been unable to reproduce the slow Encapsulate Field in C# problem in my ASP.NET projects. (Take this with a grain of salt, however, as sometimes the problem just isn't being reproduced for some other reason.) I really appreciate the Refactor feature, and this makes it usable with ASP.NET.

Conclusion

SP1 is not a panacea to all the problems in Visual Studio. If you look at my review, you will see that several of the problems here are fixed. Some things still suck, and I get mysterious failures and crashes. However, this PC might have some hardware or driver issues. SP1 is a worthy upgrade, and it is well worth the time to download it.