VisualStudio 2010

The new web application at my work is going to be Silverlight-based, which gives me an opportunity to learn a fancy new technology and add another line of gibberish to my resume.

As anybody who's worked with Silverlight will tell you, VisualStudio 2008 really doesn't help you at all. I don't have many nice things to say about XAML, and VS2008 requires you to write it by hand. We could use Expression Blend, but without a paid license you're using a crippled product, and that doesn't make any sense when you already have an expensive license to VisualStudio. Luckily, the beautiful IT people got us licenses for VisualStudio 2010, which boasts massively-improved Silverlight support.

Notice that I said "Massively-improved", not "perfect" or even "good". Yes, VS2010 is head-and-shoulders above VS2008 in terms of Silverlight support. However, I'm having a hard time really appreciating those improvements in light of the other glaring deficiencies. And there are many deficiencies still.

In the marketing and documentation VisualStudio 2010 is sold as having "Silverlight support". What does that even mean? Yes there is a new WYSIWYG editor to help improve Silverlight GUI design which produces mostly-correct XAML code. It's far better than nothing, but I find it to still be ridiculously frustrating to do even simple operations. Working with grids is tiresome. Working with controls which need to dynamically size is even worse. I find myself several times an hour wishing I could use some CSS to add style information. I find myself wishing I could specify height in percent, instead of a fixed number, the ambiguous "Auto" or as a weighted ratio. None of these are even among the most damning criticisms I have.

The set of built-in controls available to the Silverlight developer is paltry at best. If you want to write anything more complicated than a tic-tac-toe game, you're going to need to download some kind of add-in or third party package. Even some of the most basic controls that a Windows developer has grown accustomed to in the past 20 years are missing with no replacements in sight. All the best documentation, even documentation from Microsoft, recommends you download the Silverlight Toolkit to get back some of these basics. You have to wander why some of these necessary and recommended controls weren't just included in the standard libraries.

Silverlight has support for several powerful graphical features like transforms, animations, storyboards, and projections, but no good ones are available by default. Get within 20 feet of PowerPoint and some knucklehead is going to abuse the star-wipe, but the basic Silverlight library doesn't even provide you with a basic wipe, fade, slide or expand/shrink. Combine that with the fact that VisualStudio2010 doesn't really provide you with any decent tools to create these things yourself, and you find a huge new source of frustration.

And I've left my biggest complaint for last: Debugging. Let me add some emphasis here for clarity: You cannot debug a Silverlight application in VisualStudio 2010 without downloading and installing a separate, and finicky, add-on. You cannot debug Silverlight applications, by default, in an IDE which boasts "Silverlight support". If you want to debug your Silverlight application (or do other advanced operations like "unit testing"), you need to download the Silverlight Tools for VisualStudio 2010 package. I can't even imagine why they wouldn't have included this functionality directly in VisualStudio itself, if every Silverlight developer is going to need to download and install it separately for even the most basic tasks. That is a decision that boggles the mind and leaves me completely flabbergasted.

But wait! The problems have not ended once you install those tools. If you install your add-ons in the wrong order, or pick the wrong settings in VisualStudio or even your browser, or unknowingly anger the gods of programming, you still won't be able to debug. I know, it happened to me. I haven't been able to set a breakpoint since I started this web application two days ago, and it is seriously hampering my coding mojo.

I like Silverlight, generally. The reliance on XAML is a pretty lousy and short-sighted design decision, in my opinion, but isn't a killer. You do get rich client-side applications without having to write them in ActionScript or Java. I wish that VisualStudio's touted "support" was a little bit more impressive and comprehensive.  In short, I really hope that this platform and toolchain matures significantly in the coming years, because we have a growing web application that we're going to need to be expanding and maintaining for the foreseeable future.