Jelle Druyts

I guess I'm in bitch-mode anyway so why not: some random things that are driving me nuts in the Visual Studio .NET Whidbey CTP:

• Those damn datasets that keep generating an extra SomeDataSet1 file and class! It's great that we get typesafe datasets from the MSDataSetGenerator, really, but one class will do just fine thankyouverymuch. It's probably because the dataset is under source control, thereby making all the associated files readonly. This makes it pretty hard for the generator to write to the file and in stead of checking out the original file, it has the great idea of ignoring it altogether and appending a number to it in stead - thereby introducing multiple versions and breaking builds. (Just my guess.) It even messes things up sometimes if you're just looking at the dataset. What's wrong with looking at a file? Never let looking at a file trigger a checkout!
• Clicking a project item in the solution explorer when you're coming from another project makes the solution explorer scroll so that the current project node is made visible. Contrary to what someone must have thought on the design team: that's not cool. I don't expect any window to change its position or layout by just clicking in it. But what's a lot worse: if you double-click, say, a classfile and it decides to scroll then the double-click fires afterwards and you're really opening a different file. Combine that with the previous remark and you can have the great effect that double-clicking some regular class in solution explorer can cause the window to scroll, thereby making itself think you clicked a dataset, triggering it to be displayed, checked out and having it generate a SomeDataSet1 file. Did I mention this wasn't a cool feature?
• And last but not least... The eternal pain of references. This is killing me. References have been bugging me before, so please, please, pretty please with sugar on top, fix them once and for all! Although certainly not always possible, the ultimate solution to problems with references has always been using Project References. So that's what I'm doing now, but in ASP.NET they tend to switch from project references to fixed binary references that don't get updated anymore. And you wonder why you get runtime errors... So you need to check those references regularly and reset them to project references. Joy! What's even funnier is that an ASP.NET site doesn't have a project file anymore, which would be fine if there was nothing to remember for an ASP.NET project. But what about these references? I'm sorry to have noticed that, but they're stored in the solution file. Bad, bad, bad... If you have multiple solutions with the same ASP.NET project in them, it would depend on the solution file which kind of references the project would use. If you really need project-settings, revive the project file guys and recall the "no project file needed"-hype. What's one file extra going to do anyway?

Anyway, ASP.NET 2.0 still pretty much rules apart from that so that makes up for a lot

(That doesn't mean that this shouldn't all get fixed of course, so if you're reading this and can do anything at all about it that would be greatly appreciated )

By the way, I realize it's an alpha build so it's not perfect; this post will just help me re-evaluate the beta once it ships