Apr 15 2008

Diabolical Microsoft Visual Studio Quirk

by andrew

[migrated from http://edgedev.blogspot.com]:

Yet again many things have passed that have made me go hmmm… I can’t believe I have documented practically none of them. And this one almost passed unaccounted for as well, but I could not let it go. It was simply too much.

But first I must say – I am not a Microsoft hater. I use its software every day and have very few complaints. But when I do, they are huge. It’s the little things that are big and the simple things that should be so easy that get botched so royally. And it drives me crazy.

After a couple days of removing a cornucopia of betas, CTPs, and various versions of Visual Studio 2005 (along with WPF, WWF, VSTO and other sundry extenstions) I was finally up and running with a clean slate to do some serious K2 and SharePoint development. Until I discovered I couldn’t save any projects.

WHAT!? “The operation could not be completed. No such interface supported.” Now there’s a useful error. Ummm… So now file system operations are not supported… Uh… right.

So, it took longer than it should have but I finally found this thread:
http://softwarecommunity.intel.com/isn/Community/en-US/forums/thread/30236807.aspx

Which leads me to hypothesize that in all the uninstalling and re-installing perhaps this ridiculous setting in Visual Studio got mysteriously unchecked and that caused VS to stop saving projects? Right.


How much sense does a setting like this make anyway (yes, I get the point, but who in their right mind would ever want to create temporary projects); and more importantly – why does that setting seem to make it impossible to save your “temporary” project later?

After checking the box beside “Save new projects when created” and restarting VS all was well again in Not-Losing-My-Work-Land. Hmmm…