Visual C# 2005 Express Edition Beta

I've been jonesing for Eclipse's refactoring capabilities ever since I started working at Kubi. I had heard Visual C# 2005 would be adding some refactoring so I was anxious to give the beta a try. What a royal pain in the ass. It downloads and installs easy enough but it's time-bombed if you don't register and registration requires a passport account. I don't know if my passport registration experience was typical, but if it was I think MS is doomed. The first time I registered it worked OK but it would never let me log back in. It kept saying either my login name or password were incorrect. Given that I used a password I use for a lot of things I was pretty sure that wasn't the case. Regardless I chose to reset my password. When I went in to change my password to the name I had thought it already was, but that passport wouldn't accept, passport complained that the new password must be different from the old one, thereby confirming I had been right all along. Add to this mess a ton of email verifications I had to answer that took tens of minutes to arrive in my mail box and the whole experience sucked.


Why does this doom MS? MS is already behind the curve on IDE technology and loosing ground fast. If they think they are going to endear new developers to their platform with experiences like this, when you can just download and run with Eclipse or NetBeans in seconds, they are in for a rough ride.

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