Plug and pray

Remember when plug and play was going to solve all of our driver issues ? Yeah, that was a good one, right ? What has me beat, I have a Microsoft webcam, a year or two old, not sure where the CD is, so I figure I'll ask windows to find the driver for me. It can't. Now, if I bought some dodgy Chinese made $10 camera, that would make sense to me. But if the functionality doesn't work for Microsoft hardware, how can it claim to work at all, and why does it even bother me every time I plug something in, when it's never in my life actually found and downloaded a driver for me ?

Autosave

Does VS have any sort of autosave feature ? I'm not sure, but it should if it doesn't. I just added a window to my application. I got the usual message in the designer about not being able to parse a value into a DateTime. The only place my code uses any DateTime values, is in the Licensing, which is turned off by a macro in debug builds, and is not in any way called by anything that relates to the vanilla window I just created. I attached a second instance of VS to try to debug this message, but it doesn't catch it. So, if any of my code is causing this ( and it surely must be ), it is in a way far too esoteric and bizarre to be something that I could ever hope to debug and resolve. So, I spent an hour working on code, then I checked my mail, and got a debugger message that visual studio had crashed. All my work is lost. I guess I should hit save every few minutes, knowing how unstable Visual Studio is, but it's always a hard lesson to learn, that I expected it to be able to sit idle for a moment, and it just couldn't do it.

Intellisense

For reasons that I cannot understand, intellisense stops working frequently in VS for me. Now, I am not sure if how much it happens to me nowadays has to do with how quickly the VS designer breaks. My WPF project, which does no work with date times, anywhere, rarely will show a preview of my XAML, and if I get a meaningful error, it's 'cannot convert value to DateTime'. However, it's now starting to actually tell me that all the objects in my code behind do not exist, if they are defined in the XAML. So, I have to code blind, where usually I use prefixes like txt and lbl and then intellisense helps me find the control I want. Now, as I code, I am told that InitializeComponent does not exist, and my variables do not exist, either. Of course, when I do a build, it builds and runs fine.

Searching open documents in Visual Studio

Every now and again, I forget not to use an option that is fundamentally broken in a program. For example, just now, I decided to search 'Open Documents' in VS2008. I have two issues with this option. The first is that if I select it, all of the files that I have open are brought to the foreground as it searches, which both must slow things down a lot ( as surely rendering a screen of text is more work than scanning it for a word ) and leaves me with my documents all out of order from when I started. The second issue is, I just did a search for something that I knew was in an open document and no-where else. The find box, when I stopped the search, contained 10 matches. All the same line of code in the same file. I have 10 documents open, so I expect that means that it found the same match once for every document that it looked at, including the 9 that did not contain this text. One way or another, searching inside open documents only using visual studio is useless, and fundamentally broken. Who turned this code in ? Did someone write a use case that said this was what was supposed to happen ? I mean, I guess anything is possible....