Visual Studio pain points presented at the MVP Summit...

Speed of the build -

I had to point out how Visual Studio eats up precious minutes of my life when I press F5 on an already built project going through all-dependent projects again, checking for changes to verify if they need to be built again! Surely, Visual Studio can make use of intelligent techniques where it is notified of source-code changes outside the editor!

Proposed COM Component Registration in HKCU with Orcas -

The story goes this way - everybody wants their application to run with plain user privileges on Vista. Visual Studio is no exception to this rule. Problem is that when you build a COM / ActiveX component on Visual Studio,
it registers the component as a part of the post-build process. This registration installs keys in HKCR. HKCR is mapped to HKLM\Software\Classes and one cannot write to this key without having Administrative Privileges. So, the Orcas team proposes registration in HKCU (HKEY_CURRENT_USER) instead.

This would normally be fine save for the fact that -

• Software that uses COM components would need to be installed on a per-user basis on a Workstation.
• If keys are written to HKCU, the user with no administrative privileges would have write privileges on it - and can potentially damage the deployment.

As a result, software deployment and maintenance expenses would escalate.

MVPs were unanimous that this change would cause deployment issues. I have escalated this problem with the Visual Studio management and we are discussing possible solutions.

Lets see how things work out!