Help! VC Express driving me nutz...!!!

[Jack Norton]

I "WANTED" to make the switch from VC6 to VC express, but... that ... "program"... is driving me nuts!!!
No matter what I do, the "Apply Changes and continue" option in debug remains always disabled!!! WTF !? I checked a few official forum threads and it appears to be a documented bug:
http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=816153&SiteID=1

if anyone found a workaround for this, I would appreciate it... I even tried to build a new win32 app from scratch with a basic 10 lines of code, but still, no ALT+F10 option for me...!! :mad:

[Huge]

Are you sure it's allowed by the "express" licence? I spent a couple of hours looking for where to turn on the JIT debugging (bring up a dialog box when your program crashes asking if you want to attach to the process) only to find it wasn't in the express edition. spewing.

[Jack Norton]

Found it... really stupid IMHO.
If you build your .exe in another directory beside the default one, edit/continue doesn't work :rolleyes:
Of course I had to find it the hard way, wasting 1day. The VC6 didn't had this problem.

[HappyCat]

Yeah, but VC6 also wasn't free :)

[Jack Norton]

I prefer to pay for something that works, rather than wasting my time trying to guess what bug has a free tool :D

[HappyCat]

Fair enough - I'm just saying that you shouldn't necessarily expect the free cut-down version to have all the same functionality as the full version :)

[Jack Norton]

I shouldn't expect a program TO WORK ? :confused:

BTW - I switched back to VC6. I'll never touch express again.

[HappyCat]

But it does work - you worked out how - it just works within certain "limitations" of the free version (either intentionally, or by poor design choices). If you didn't expect the free version of VS to have any limitations then you were probably being a bit optimistic :)

I'm not trying to claim that VS Express is perfect - we use VS 2005 Professional at work because Express was just too limited for us - but I'd never call it rubbish - it's great for hobbyist devs who can't afford a full version (like me for the non-work coding I do at home) - if you want a full replacement for VC6 you'd need to purchase a full version of VS 2005.

[Jack Norton]

Well if I was SURE that the full version hadn't such problems I would buy it... the problem is that I'm definitely not very confident about it :o

[ChilledOut]

In Visual Studio 6, edit and continue hardly ever seemed to work for me anyway. I got out of the habit of trying to use it, so I'm not really sure about how well it works in 2003 & 2005. Is it a feature that you find yourself using often (and successfully)?

[lennard]

I used to use edit & continue all the time in VC 6 but it doesn't work nearly as well in 2005 and I haven't figured out what the rules are for getting the apply changes and continue button to light up. Ditto for Brief emulation which has different bugs than VC 6 had but which are even worse (largest offender being the fact that the power key for cut selection doesn't work).

Haven't figured out how in the heck the new help system works either. I find myself backing up and using VC 6.0 for projects whenever I don't need 2005 which is kind of lame.

And speaking of lame, if they really disabled functionality whenever you are working in a different directory and didn't put up a dialog to explain it... that is somewhere between lame and evil.

[wazoo]

pffft. Baby stuff. ;)

Just *wait* until you encounter the MSVCRT80.DLL.

muhaahahaha....muhahahhahah..muhaaahhahahaah..

You know those lovely games that force you to go through hell without a save point, then the computer decides you must die within arms reach of one forcing you to repeat everything again? *That's* the MSVCRT80.DLL...

[Jack Norton]

Hah no worries, I switched back to the old VC6 and I can work again :D

Btw my last attempt with VC Express was something really incredibile. I re-create a project from scratch, try edit/continue and miracle works! so I work on my next game for 30-40 min.
Then I close the program and reopen it - without any pause, just CLOSE - OPEN with 10s of delay.
Wonder what? edit continue magically doesn't work anymore - if isn't a SERIOUS BUG this one...!!!! LOL

Now I realize why everyone seems to keep using VC6!!