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Comment by n8cpdx | Hacker News Reader

Try programming for Xamarin, UWP, or anything involving multitargeting.

The list of actions for which closing visual studio, deleting a bunch of random folders, and restarting is long. Unfortunately it includes any changes to project files, because the project system is super broken with anything multitargeting related. That basically means I have to completely restart my IDE and run a script to clean everything maybe 15 times a day. And fuck me if I’m trying to find where a regression happened (which means changing dependencies, which live in the csproj).

I remember when I didn’t have to restart VS 30 times a day, and memorize which build errors actually aren’t errors, and do random sequences of events to work around bugs, and memorize which unsuppressable warnings are legitimate and which are not. Before those days, Visual Studio was indeed an incredible accomplishment.

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> Try programming for Xamarin, UWP, or anything involving multitargeting.

The complaints in the original article fell rather flat to me, but this is one area where it's absolutely fair to criticize VS. More generally, the reason that build tooling in the .net sphere is such a mess is because of historical baggage from VS.

With that said, if you're coloring within the lines[1], VS is very powerful and productive.

[1] To an extent. There definitely are use cases that are "supported" only in name.

> More generally, the reason that build tooling in the .net sphere is such a mess is because of historical baggage from VS.

This is part of why the .NET hot reload fiasco was such a big deal to me; it felt like doubling down on one of .NET's biggest weaknesses.

I used VS for years across a couple of C/C++/C# projects, and it was second to none with one exception.

The exception was Xamarin/Xamarin.Forms. Seriously, congrats to the Xamarin people for getting that project going, but it was (at least into Xamarin.Forms 1-3) more than a little hacky and extremely frustrating. Granted, it kind of had to be though given that it was intended for a broader audience targeting completely different platforms, and at least initially didn't have a lot of MS support iirc.

I think the issues surrounding cross-platform targeting were/are less a problem with the IDE itself than what it was/is forced to work with. The whole iOS "code in VS on Windows, but build on a Mac" was a nightmare, I don't know if things have gotten any better.

They’ve actively gotten worse. I should have clarified that my “I remember when” comment applied to 5 years ago, not 15. Reverse progress on that timescale just isn’t acceptable IMO. MAUI is supposed to fix it, but I’m not sure they’ll have a developer community left to use it by then.

>I remember when I didn’t have to restart VS 30 times a day, and memorize which build errors actually aren’t errors, and do random sequences of events to work around bugs, and memorize which unsuppressable warnings are legitimate and which are not. Before those days, Visual Studio was indeed an incredible accomplishment.

This is because the software you're building today is far more complicated than before (from the IDE's perspective), and it doesn't do a good job of keeping up. There's a reason why so many people jump to VSCode these days - it gives you less bells and whistles, but it won't blow up on you when you try to do something moderately complex.

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