The first ever VS 2008 fix has just been released!
I was delighted to find out this weekend (maybe I was a day or two behind) that a patch or hot fix (however you want to call it) was released by Microsoft Visual Studio team in order to fix some issues with Visual Studio 2008. You can download that update here. The most important issue that I was mostly concerned about the new IDE is its slow responsive design/code view. Sometimes, it will often freeze while I type in a few characters to alter either the markup or the design view itself but this only has occurred to me while working on a huge project. I guess from the rave and articles that I've read so far, it appears as if the "bug" has been fixed, but I have yet to find out the real test myself. Another fix that was another concern of mine was the delay of showing the properties when a control has focus. The property usually doesn't show or it takes several double-clicks before it works. Supposedly, this bug is also fixed according to the update description. I just installed it at my home laptop but the real test that I was referring to is when I actually work and open up a huge project since this is when the problem occurs.
Another bug that I'm also aware of that I think the fix was not included in this release is the "content page error" that comes up when opening up a page that uses a Master page. I did a little bit of search on this error and it doesn't appear that a lot of people has this problem although there are quite a few that does. In any case, I believe that it is still a bug that needs to be fixed and this is something that I'm a little bit disappointed about Visual Studio 2008. A few solution that were given by users is to do a view>refresh on design view and as well as doing a re-install on the application itself. While both solutions sounded well, unfortunately, none worked for me...and at the moment still waiting on another viable solution to my problem. This problem only occurs on my work laptop since my home laptop does actually works as far as opening up a page that utilizes a master page. The only difference that I can think of is that in my home laptop, I work with a project that has been upgraded to 3.5 framework already while my work still is configured to use 2.0. That's the only thing that I can think of at this moment and hopefully, upgrading to 3.5 framework will solve this issue for me when I actually do the upgrade in the near future.
ASP.NET Wiki
Another discovery this weekend that I'm also happy about is the release of ASP.NET Wiki (beta). The purpose of this project is to somehow organize ASP.NET content in a Wiki-style dedicated resource. Among the other things that the ASP.NET crew is working on, I think that this is a great idea since the subject of ASP.NET is considerably huge and the resources are scattered all over the Internet. While anyone can type and Google up a particular subject of interest, the results will come out to thousands of pages. The ASP.NET Wiki selectively organizes all contents that are associated within a particular "tag" or label and add them in a single page containing all associated and related links. Since this is a "Wiki", what makes this project special is that everyone in the ASP.NET community can add and update contents whenever they place, so hopefully this will develop into something huge in the near future. Anything that constitutes a community-based or driven resource inspires growth since there's numerous amount of talents and knowledge out there. I'll be using this one for sure.