Ok, I need to let off some steam, hence I'm making my first rant post on t.m.o - and no, it's not related to the N900, Maemo or Nokia whatsoever, if anything, the situation that I'll describe made me love my N900 even more. This will be probably a lenghty post, and if you are not interested in some developer ranting, I'd advise you to move along.

First a little background - I am a System Architect and a Chief FE Developer at my company, which usually means that I'm designing a complete system structure when a new project arrives and then I work closely with the FE team to iron out the low-level implementation of it for the FE part. In some rare ocasions I'm doing the low-level implementations on the BE as well (and that was the case this time). Also, in some rare occasions I don't get to choose which techologies will be used on the both sides so I have to work within some boundaries, and that was the case this time as well. In most cases, I'd stick to the proven, familiar and (mostly) open-source solutions for which we already have a decent code-base and know-how to start with hence speeding up the development by a huge margin - that usually means using Apache, Tomcat, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Java, Perl, PHP, Python and C/C++ on the BE side, and Flash, AIR, HTML/AJAX and C/C++ on the FE side, of course depending on the project in question. As you may notice, all of those are mostly OS technologies, and all of them have a decent environments within the Eclipse IDE which I learned to love even more after this episode. Also, I forgot to mention that all of the described events are happening on my home computer as I usually work from home in the beginning stages of most projects when 16hr+/day of work is quite a common occurance.

So, what have gone wrong this time? I didn't get to chose what will be used on the BE - the requirement was .NET and C#. For that purpose we outsourced a company that specializes in C# to do our BE. I might rant on the competence, or rather lack of it, of that team but that's for another topic possibly named "Who let all those script kiddies to call themselves programmers?" or "What happened with the programmers that actually do love, and take a pride in, their job". Sufficient to say I had to dig into the C# myself to help them with their work. Since I wasn't interested in paying anything to Microsoft, I downloaded and installed Visual C# .NET Express Edition, which should be enough for my needs (proof-of-concept testing, platform exploration, code snippets) and apart from an occasional quick code checking I havent't used it and it rested dormant on my system since the mid-January, when the project started.

A few days ago, the project went into a stage where a specific task was required from the BE team (byte-level reading and editing of .swf files) and they had no idea how to do that (and god knows how it would look like seeing the quality of code they are producing). To save the time it was decided that I should build that tool as I have an extensive knowledge of .swf internal structure (I was on the Flash Player team at Macromedia in the early stages of the Flash platform after all). And that's where I made a huge mistake - I could've chosen any technology/language I liked (as long as it runs on a Windows platform) and make the BE team access it via a system call, but since it would have to be executed fairly often at a run-time I decided to write a native C# implementation of it so they could integrate it tightly in their system.

So I fired up the aforementioned Visual C# EE and started building it - I made a project, created needed structure, class interfaces and etc. Since I had no prior knowledge of C# (tho once you know one language, you know them all) it took me almost 24 hours to finish it, and as I was polishing it and putting comments in the code getting it ready to put it on SVN - Visual C# crashed! Ok, no biggie, it happens... or so I thought. However when I started it again, there was no project to be found, no classes, no interfaces - it was like I haven't done anything in the past full day, anything at all. An extensive search through all my hard drives yelded no result either. The files are just gone!

It turns out that the Visual C# is nothing like any other IDE I've ever heard of, or had a pleasure/misfortune to work in. Scratch that, it's unlike any application I have heard of! When you create a project, and add files to it, and save files to it - it actually doesn't save anything on the HDD! Only when you are exiting the application it will ask you if you want to save your project on the HDD, or will save them only if you choose an easy to miss and somewhat cryptic menu option... And that's when, hmmm, the fecal matter really hit the fan...

Since it had to write the files somewhere, even if only temporary for compilation purposes, I've decided to try some of the undelete software out there in a naive hope that I'll be able to retreive those temporary files. The base scans (MFT read) yelded no results, but since I was not ready to give up on a full day of work (and I couldn't anyway, I barely managed to get it done by the milestone) I decided to let the software do a full surface scan, and since it takes some time to do that on a 1TB drive I decided to take a nap as I was awake for almost 72 hours. A few hours later I woke up only to find that my computer has rebooted and that the BIOS is reporting 'Read Error' when trying to load the MBR from the master drive.

I started my diagnostic tools and they started reporting more and more errors each time I was running them, even tho all the S.M.A.R.T self-tests were passing with flying colors. A few hours later I've managed to somehow read one of the partitions and move the work folder out of it (otherwise I'd loose about 2 months of work as most of the modified code was not commited to the SVN as it required branching for which I didn't get the time to do) and then the disk crashed totally...

So, now I'm in for some heavy system rebuilding, and possibly days of work to get my system to the previous state, all because of the #$*#=*# Visual C# idiotic project handling.

Rant complete.

P.S. How this situation made me love the Maemo/N900 even more, you ask? Well, since I left my laptop at the office, and my home computer is dead, guess how am I accessing the internet and posting my rant...

Actually that's an issue with the IDE (Visual Studio) rather than the language. It is irritation but frequent saves (as with anything in Windows) is sensible. Loosing all files is normally indicative of an issue during save, the files are updated when you hit save on a single file though.

Well, I did save dozen of times (I did at least 100 of compilations), it just doesn't tell you that the regular ctrl+S doesn't save the file on HDD until you explicitly save the project. You need to do File / Save All for that when you create your project, and there is no indication of such behavior. You will also be noticed of that when you try to exit the VS, but when it crashes - the files are gone.

I only later discovered that behavior by finding a post somewhere on the interwebs by some Microsoft official. Later I found out that until you explicitly save the project, it stores it for compiling reasons in a temporary folder, but, alas, whenever you start the IDE it cleans up the whole temporary folder so all the data prior its crash gets deleted when you start it again. For f. sake, even the Word has recovery feature...

ZWER:

I feel your pain. I toyed with Visual Studio and something similar happened to me.

When I tried to save my work one of the files just "disappeared" - No idea where it went!

I am usually meticulous saving my files (I used SourceSafe many, many years ago!) but took it for granted the IDE would save reliably.
Stupid me!

Anyway, I think the .net platform is interesting in itself but I find the IDE a bit heavyweight. I've used others (Eclipse, Netbeans, monodevelop) but I just think Visual Studio is bit bloated (like a fat-man trying to dance like a ballerina).

Maybe have a look at mono .

My "thanks" button is missing otherwise I would "thank" the posts here.

The MS IDE is not required for .NET development. I have used notepad in the past and the compiler is actually part of the runime so you don't need to even go near VS. To be honest I'd be surprised you've only had issues with the saving, VS has a reputation for occasionally hosing a file structure totally.

I have seen people using Eclipse to edit .NET projects so maybe thats worth investigating? it doesn't save the pain for now I know but maybe if you have to do it again.

While I'm at work I usually use jEdit.
(I'm currently using it for some vbscript (blech!) stuff at the moment).

Syntax highlighting for most languages is handy and the irony of using a java-based program to wrire .net stuff will hopefully make you feel better.

Like Fargus says you don't need an MS IDE (or any IDE) to create .net software.
You can use your editor of choice and create a macro to call the .net compiler.

I highly recommend jEdit though not quite as "big" as Eclipse or netbeans and very simple to use.

this must be a "feature" of the express edition, the professional edition i use at work definitely saves files directly to disk when i hit ctrl+s


i'm very sorry to hear you lost so much work. nothing more annoying than having to do stuff twice...

Mmmh.. I think with the express editions, when you make a new project, and before you actually save the solution, the IDE tucks the project away in a folder so it can save the files, do compilation etc.. Which can lead to the problem you have here

The full VS, when creating a solution, asks where you want it putting.. I know this doesnt help you now but getting the company to buy a full copy of the proper VS may save you much frustration next time around. Have heart; the apps are always quicker to write the second time around, can end up better and if you need any C# help just skype/msn me (I'll send you the details in a pm)

Off-topic, but the "Thanks" button actually caused Ubuntu Forums some grief back when they had it. They had to turn their "Thanks" button off.