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 1724: trashes user changes with multiple instances
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SamHocevar
Junior Member

France
15 Posts

Posted - Jun 24 2009 :  06:11:54 AM  Show Profile  Reply with Quote
VAX trashes my user settings changes when I have several Visual Studio instances running.

Steps to reproduce :
- open Visual Studio (session A)
- open Visual Studio again (session B)
- change random VAX settings in session B
- close session B
- open Visual Studio again (session C): the changes are still here
- close session C
- close session A
- open Visual Studio again (session D): the changes have disappeared

Apparently closing session A overwrote the changes I made. This probably breaks a dozen UI rules. If I don't change the settings, VAX has no right to modify them.

Please try to propagate user settings changes to other sessions. If that is not easily done, other sessions must definitely not trash manual user changes.

feline
Whole Tomato Software

United Kingdom
18702 Posts

Posted - Jun 24 2009 :  2:01:28 PM  Show Profile  Reply with Quote
The last IDE you close saves out the VA settings. This is a common approach programs take.

If you make a change in session A, and a different change in session B, then what is supposed to happen? The current behaviour is not always idea, but it has the virtue of being simple to understand.

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SamHocevar
Junior Member

France
15 Posts

Posted - Jun 25 2009 :  05:05:51 AM  Show Profile  Reply with Quote
quote:
Originally posted by feline

The last IDE you close saves out the VA settings. This is a common approach programs take.



No. It is the absolute worst approach in handling user preferences, and no sane application does that, especially not Visual Studio. I don't know what "programs" you are talking about.

1) It loses information without any warning or user interaction

As demonstrated in the original report.

2) It loses information when the application unexpectedly quits

This is easy to verify:

  • Open Visual Studio

  • Modify a random Visual Assist X setting

  • Click "OK", continue working

  • Kill Visual Studio using the process browser

  • Reopen Visual Studio: the changes have disappeared


I hope you'll agree that this is a plausible scenario. Visual Studio is not crash proof, it happens quite often and I have no control over which session will crash first.

3) It is inconsistent with the general Visual Studio behaviour

Visual Studio saves its settings as soon as the user clicks on "OK" in the options window. This is easy to verify:

  • Open Visual Studio

  • Modify a random Visual Studio setting

  • Click "OK", continue working

  • Kill Visual Studio using the process browser

  • Reopen Visual Studio: the changes are still here


You can also verify that Visual Studio does not show the behaviour mentioned in the original report.

quote:

If you make a change in session A, and a different change in session B, then what is supposed to happen? The current behaviour is not always idea, but it has the virtue of being simple to understand.



If I make a change in session A, and a different change in session B, then the last changes I made must take precedence.

The ideal solution would be for changes in session A to be automatically propagated to session B, but I understand this is not easily done if the B configuration window is already open. However, reloading the configuration file when the user opens the configuration window looks like a reasonable compromise.

In all cases, Visual Assist X should not trash my user settings when I did not even open the configuration window.

Edited by - SamHocevar on Jun 25 2009 05:11:23 AM
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