Visual Studio 2008: First (Bad) Impressions

I’ve been running VS2008 Pro Beta 2 for awhile and had mostly good luck with it. There were only two recurring bugs that got to be annoying. The first was that after typing CssClass or class in the HTML source editor and hitting ‘=’ the automatic quotes (which I enabled in the settings) would be doubled so auto-complete would generate CssClass="""" instead of CssClass="". I found the bug in Connect and MS said it would be resolved in RTM.

Visual Studio Error Message The other bug popped up when I double-clicked a .aspx file in the solution explorer while the corresponding .aspx.cs file was already open. I’d get an "This document is opened by another project." error dialog but the file would open normally. I never took the time to track that bug down in Connect.

Today I download the RTM bits and the first bug still exists in a way. Now I don’t get any automatic quotes (I doublechecked that its enabled) for CssClass/class. So now on auto-complete I get CssClass= or class=. All other attribute names generate the auto quotes, even nonsense words. I reset my Visual Studio settings to the defaults and I still get the error.

As for the second bug, it still exists. I thought it might be VisualSVN causing it but the dialog title is "Microsoft Visual Studio" and it happens with web sites that aren’t in SVN.

Neither bug is a showstopper, but they are very aggravating. Is anyone else experiencing these issues?

UPDATE: The first bug only happens if you have no styles defined in your document or a linked stylesheet OR if VS hasn’t yet parsed your linked styles (it can take a few seconds after loading a document). Still annoying if you’re working on a new document and haven’t defined any styles yet. The second bug appears to be an issue with one of my add-ons as I was unable to replicate it on another machine. I don’t know which add-on yet.

UPDATE 2: MS was able to replicate the first bug and is going to fix it for a future release (thanks to the guys on the Web Dev Tools team for their quick and helpful responses!). After uninstalling all my add-ins, I narrowed the second bug down to VisualSVN and have contacted them to let them know.

Posted November 19th, 2007 9:59 PM
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  • John
  • Fredrik Josefsson
    The quoting-feature of CssClass is still buggy.
    Try this:

    Go to Tools->Options->Text Editor HTML->Format and uncheck "Insert attribute value quotes when formatting"

    The CssClass property still gets quotes.
  • Philipp
    Not related to CSS but VS2008: WPF support is just plain bad - the designer quits every now and then and the whole IDE crashed about 5 times within the last 3 hours. Sometimes, I really wish I was a Java developer, happily working on Eclipse under my Ubuntu :-(
  • Omar Khan
    Hi John,

    Thank you for bringing these two issues to our attention. The first issue was unfortunately fixed incorrectly. We are re-activating that bug and will try to address it properly in an upcoming service pack. Likewise, for the second issue we are opening an internal bug and will prioritize to try and fix it in an upcoming service pack as well.

    Thank you again for taking the time to provide us this feedback via MSConnect and helping make the Visual Studio product better. If you find any other issues don't hesitate to report them to us, or email me at omark-at-microsoft-dot-com.

    -Omar Khan (Visual Web Developer Team)
  • CssClass is working as expected for me now (It quad quoted for me in Beta 2 as well).

    I uninstalled everything even tangentially related to VS 2008 and/or .NET 3.5 before installing the RTM. Not sure if that made the difference, but it's an idea.
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