Concurrency Bug in all editions of Visual Studio

You often have more than one copy of visual studio open. When you change a setting in visual studio, the change will be wiped out if you close another copy of visual studio after you close the current one.

This is a frustrating bug, and one that could be addressed in simple ways. The best approach would be if settings were merged together. Say I've changed the C# settings in one instance of visual studio, and I've changed the tool box settings in another instance. There's no conflict there, so all settings could be merged together.

Okay, so that's difficult. How about if settings are only saved then they've been changed. That would be enough to fix a good percentage (perhaps the majority) of problems with concurrency.

The current "Last In Wins" approach is really out of place -- when you consider how much effort they've put into the rest of the settings architecture. There's at least fifteen pages about settings at msdn..

'Simon' on Wed, 25 Oct 2006 06:43:05 GMT, sez:

I'm glad it's not just me. I've been irritated by this for a while now.

'Locutus of Borg' on Wed, 25 Oct 2006 06:45:07 GMT, sez:

+1 SecretGeek
I mean, how hard is it to persist the options when you press OK on the options window?

'Russell' on Wed, 25 Oct 2006 13:08:17 GMT, sez:

No kidding. Pain in the ass. I shouldn't be THAT hard to have a shared config mechanism.

'Bill McCarthy' on Wed, 25 Oct 2006 19:33:27 GMT, sez:

But what if I really do want the last in wins behaviour ? In fact, isn't that going to be the more common scenario once you have things as you like ?

Take for example, you have your IDE all nicely setup, but then you have this one project you want to change settings for, such as debugging settings. You probably don't want that messing with any other instances of the IDE you have open.

Unfortunately the behaviour is inconsistant in that you can only "temporarily" apply changes if you have another instance open. IDeally you should be able to apply the changes to (1) this instance only, or (2) all instances.

In the case of (2), ideally there would be notification to any opne instances of the IDE, but this may be a bit more complex such as when you are in debug mode, and the change impacts on the debug information, hence requiring debugging to close and re-start. In those cases, perhaps a message box warning, and the option to delay the update till the mode changes, etc.

'lb' on Wed, 25 Oct 2006 21:39:47 GMT, sez:

Good to hear from ya Bill!

>ideally there would be notification to any
>open instances of the IDE

yeh -- i think this would be overkill. I'd be happy with any improvement on the status quo, without any risk of breaking things.

>for example, you have your IDE all nicely >setup, but then you have this one project >you want to change settings for, such as >debugging settings

then you'd have to change that setting back later! not too hard. maybe.

the alternative:

>be able to apply the changes to
>(1) this instance only,
>or (2) >all instances.

that sounds a bit like one of those nasty "in your face" type settings... didn't Word used to ask the same question whenever normal.dot changed? yuck... things...

i guess there could be a setting somewhere that says
"when i change settings:
(_) save them immediately or
(_) don't save them (just keep them for this instance) or
(_) save them at shut down time"

'AsbjornM' on Sun, 12 Nov 2006 12:02:15 GMT, sez:

This should be easy.. every instance should whatch the configuration, when it's changed eiterh from notepad (if possible), or other instance, then settings should be reloaded by other instances and merged there, then you would not have any strange behaviour when closing the last instance.

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