Girish Gangadharan

Hey Visual studio! We need to talk.

// July 23rd, 2006 // Visual Studio.Net

There are some things you do for me automatically by default assuming that i am an idiot and that i have no clue what i am doing when i’m building an application. It’s like you are indirectly telling me that “Look! i’m smarter than you and i will do things for you that you don’t need and you can go change it if you don’t like it.”

Not cool, babe!

For example, yesterday i was building a custom control and everything seemed fine initially. When i wanted to use the control in another project, it just wouldn’t work. I checked whether i had copied the custom control’s dll to the bin folder of the project i was working with. It was there. I checked if i had in fact added it to the references. I did. Was i using the right syntax? Yes. Then what the hell was the problem? The error message was that you couldn’t find the control in the dll under the given namespace. But the namespace was right. I had specifically set it to “GG” in the control. Here’s how i tried to use it in the test project.

I had no freaking clue what was going on. I tried rebuilding the solution, rebuilding the control and copy-pasting a fresh copy of the dll into the bin folder everytime. Nope. Didn’t work. It was like you were teasing me and i certainly did not appreciate it.

And then finally i remembered what Russ told me about what you do when someone adds a new project to the solution. He said you set the rootnamespace by default to the name of the project and that needs to be removed if i plan to have my own namespace for the project

So i right click on the project in the solution explorer and click on “Properties” as shown below.

And this is what i see

You had in fact set the root namespace to the name of the project by default. Sigh!

Now why would you do that, honey? Please don’t be like that. I love you and i’ll do anything for you and you know that. But please don’t act oversmart. Show some respect here. I know you are smart and i totally dig that. In fact, it turns me on sometimes. But please don’t think i’m an idiot when i’m using you. I know how you are structured and how you work. I know almost all of the features you were built with. I also know how to use most of them to unleash your full potential, babe. Trust me! I can do wonders with you.

Now that we are on the topic, i have a couple of other things to discuss with you. Let’s just get it over with. The other day when i was trying to bind you to the solution in visual source safe (VSS – Your cousin), something pissed you off. I don’t what happened and what triggered your madness. But you just went nuts and used 100% of my CPU and 1.4GB of my memory. And then after 15 minutes, you gave me this message.

I mean…seriously! Is that all you got for me? Catastrophic failure? What am i supposed to do with that? Could you be more specific next time, hon? I know sometimes you have your moments. But i wonder what the guy that actually wrote that piece of code when building you, was thinking when he/she was in fact writing that? “Yeah…i’m just gonna tell them something bad happened. The measure of bad being in the magnitude of a catastrophy. The user can figure out what went wrong.”

Last but not least(cliche!), i still wonder how childish you can be sometimes even after growing up to be such a charming young lady. In fact these days, i think you are a super woman. That’s how i look at you. But you still let the kid in you come out and play once in a while especially when i’m in the middle of rebuilding the solution. I understand that it can be a royal pain the butt to rebuild 16 projects in the solution, one at a time. But c’mon now…that doesn’t call for a peek-a-boo game in the middle of the working hours. You just disappeared during the re-build! Right in front of my eyes…whoosh! Vanished into thin air! I quickly pulled up the task manager and there you were – devenv.exe eating up memory and cpu cycles. But nowhere to be found to the naked eye in Windows. Grow up, sweety! Not all guys think that’s cute.

And while i’m at it, let me clear up something. I’m NOT having an affair with nant. She’s just a friend that helps me out with the build, especially when you are playing your little games of hide and seek. I don’t think she can give me what you can(one word – intellisense) and i don’t have any feelings for her anyways. If you play nice with me, i’ll stop going to her for help..ok?

I know you have tons of complaints against me. Especially the way i write inefficient code that drives CLR crazy. But let’s talk about it another day.

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