Update 8/12/2008: Microsoft has released Service Pack 1 for Visual Studio 2008, which resolves these problems. See the last post on this page:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=27673c47-b3b5-4c67-bd99-84e525b5ce61
Update 3/30/2008: Microsoft has finally released two hotfixes that address these problems. See the last post on this page:
http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=2799211&SiteID=1
I've now spent a couple of weeks using Visual Studio 2008 for C++ development, and my conclusion is that it's unusable. Those of you who follow this blog know that I'm generally supportive of Microsoft's errors, but this time there's no excuse.
Our project is about 250,000 lines of code, a relatively small project by some measures. Every few builds, you get this error:
LINK : fatal error LNK1000: Internal error during IncrBuildImage
And the build crashes. If you rebuild, it succeeds, but this doesn't help much for automated builds that rely on a deterministic compile result. The problem only appears if you have incremental linking turned on, but disabling incremental linking makes debugging unbearably slow and painful.
I'm not the only one having this problem:
https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=311732
If you are reading this blog, please go to that page and register your vote for an importance of five stars.
So I've just been living with that problem, since we're largely in a testing phase for VS2008 and automated builds aren't yet needed. Today I ran into another problem, and this one's a showstopper. The first time the compiler encounters a file that fails to compile because of a particular set of errors, the vc80.pdb program database file is corrupted and it's impossible to build any more files until you do a Rebuild All. Except that rebuilding everything causes the file to be rebuilt, which again corrupts the PDB file. Even if you try to compile that file by itself (using Build/Compile), the PDB file is still corrupted.
This problem was not only known, if was reported during the beta process, but never fixed:
https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=308775
https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=309462
Both of the above problems have been open for 30 to 60 days. Perhaps a severity of "entire build fails catastrophically" isn't as serious as I think it is.
