Fairly recently, my job has had me doing more and more Windows-oriented work (C/C++). I'm no big fan of Windows, but whatever, it's the platform this project is on. Furthermore, I'm not much of an IDE guy, I prefer doing most of my work with Textpad and a command prompt. Regardless, I've used Visual Studio before, and it has in my experience been the only IDE that was not terrible*. And by not terrible, I mean it lets me write, compile, and debug my programs while being stable, fast, and not taking up 500 megs of runtime memory (*cough*Eclipse*cough*).
Oh, how things have changed between VS6 and VS2005. Visual Studio 2005 (nee 8.0) has a habit of crashing. Often. For any reason. For no reason. Because you looked at it funny. It crashes so often that it has a built in feature to restart VS when it crashes, which to me seems to be the developers just admitting defeat. Now, it's embarrassing enough (not to mention absurd) to have crashes in a development and debugging tool (because, you see, if you're developing a development tool, one would hope... well, you get the picture).
But that's not why I'm writing. I'm also not writing about how terribly buggy the syntax highlighting is, especially when it comes to active versus inactive preprocessor blocks. Or how useless the search feature is. Or how it sometimes misses changes in header files and you have to clean and rebuild all to actually have them included. Or the fact that it crashes if you close the tabs too fast. I'm writing because of one special feature. That is, and you know you all love this one: when you double-click on an error message in the output window, it takes you to the line that contains the error. Very handy, I'm sure you would all agree. This feature has a slight bug, however. If you double-click on a linking error (which has no associated line), the behavior is yet another crash. This is repeatable, 100% of the time. VS2005 has been out for about 2 years now. I have the latest service packs installed. This bug is trivially reproducible, and, unless the code is such a WTF that it is beyond my imagination, a very easy fix. And yet it still occurs. How can they not have fixed this? Please, someone explain it to me.
* You haven't seen a truly terrible IDE until you've tried Texas Instruments' Code Composer Studio. Now there's a WTF of staggering proportions.
** Or Forte, which, being written in Java, ran your test programs as a thread. This had the nice effect that if your own threads had some issues (deadlocks, infinite loops, wild thread spawning, et cetera), you had to kill the IDE.