That is awful and why I have always been very sceptical of software moving to the cloud.
Just yesterday I had a similar issue with Resharper, where our local licence server was down for the day. Luckily I was able to enable a 30-day trial. (and I guess Resharper isn't that mandatory to get work done)
It used to be you bought a key to unlock it permanently, but nowadays it ties your license to your Microsoft account. There’s a link to “unlock with a product key“, but I have no idea how you get one of those. I hate renting software rather than owning it, but also VS2019 is where I’m most productive so I put up with it.
This isn’t even the first time this has happened. I do most of my development on my desktop computer, sometimes I go long stretches without using my laptop. More than once I opened up my laptop on a flight to try and get some coding work done, but surprise, license is expired and I don’t have any connectivity to renew it. Absolutely ridiculous.
You used to be able to get keys for all windows software through an MSDN account. No idea if that's still the case, would have been around 2017 last time I had one.
Time travel (reverse) debugging is a killer feature and only available for 2019 onwards. Prior to that you have to use their "IntelliTrace" stuff, which isn't nearly as good.
I have always been very sceptical of software moving to the cloud.
Me too. After a disastrous episode with DropBox while travelling in foreign countries nearly a decade ago, I instituted my own File Server that's accessible via the Internet. All of my data is 'safe at home' with daily backups.
Its less of a hassle to use something like nginx reverse proxy docker container in front of your web services, as it comes preconfigured with some best practices regarding TLS. (TLS1.2+ only by default) https://hub.docker.com/r/jwilder/nginx-proxy
If you use docker, be sure to google around how to manage firewall with containers (must use DOCKER-USER chain instead of INPUT)
Ofcourse, you will get a bit involved in setup step if you choose to tie nginx proxy, letsenccrypt and nextcloud containers. But search engine is your friend.
Not sure if it's a "best practice", but you can get a fairly Dropbox'ish experience by running a nextcloud/owncloud instance. It even comes in docker containers, so setup is quite simple.
Either sftp/ssh with key-only logins (ie. no passwords), or Syncthing (depending on the volume of data, rate of changes, speed and costs of your network transits)
I now keep my primary 'work' and 'private' collections (10-30g each) and a large shared set (350g) synced across desktop & laptop, and also 3 off-site archive servers, using Syncthing. This includes a literal satellite connection for one site.
It was probably my fault in configuration, however the idea was to have a DropBox whereby I could put in files while travelling with my laptop and those files would be taken up with my home server.
Except that it worked in reverse. My laptop was 'emptier' than the home server, so the home server's files were deleted to match the laptop. Hundreds of megabytes of files were destroyed before I managed to stop it.
On top of that, I only had a 2 gig per month quota for internet access while travelling, and all the DropBox activity soon exhausted that in days.
On later trips my own home server coped very well, with less overall unwanted activity.
Yes? I have never heard the concept of "bricking your IDE" before. How badly could you mess up and not be able to reset it? If your IDE can break dramatically without an obvious method to revert to a good state, consider a different IDE.
Welcome to Visual Studio, the home of updates that take hours to install and sometimes end up bricking your IDE.
To be fair, that hasn't happened in a pretty long time for me - but in the earlier days it was commonplace. It used to be bleeding edge features that would do it, other times it was just because they took so long, that interrupting the process of upgrading or installing caused a mess. Or installing the newest version alongside the older version, etc.
Visual Studio is a massive and complex creature (much like other "big IDEs", such as Eclipse) - although it has become much more streamlined in more recent releases - considering how complex it is.
EDIT: To be clear, problems often involved corruption of registry values, library/DLL hell, small database or configuration files and caches, etc. that happened with Visual Studio in the scenarios above.
I've been using it since Visual Studio .NET 2003.. so we as developers didn't all have virtual machines, image-based backups or things like Docker/Vagrant back in late 2003/early 2004.
Yes, since the inception of these kinds of tools, recovery from these corruptions became easier by restoring from an image. Still, in the early days, you could burn a lot of time doing anything of these things!
Yeah I have been using VS for nearly a decade now but I've never 'bricked' it.
Sure, sometimes installing new versions alongside old versions could cause issues. But that's a managed process that one team member would do before the whole team migrated and any issues would be worked out during that stage. (one of our old upgrade steps was to install 2015 before 2013 because doing it the other way around would break something in 2013; 2013 still being needed for some projects).
I have never been in the situation where the entire company (or even entire team) was locked out of their IDE.
Just to back this up, I've also bricked my VS installation multiple times when I worked in that environment. However, some of that was self inflicted when I was trying to figure out how to restore older sub versions of vs 2019 before they started publishing the manifests publicly.
Also, while this isn't bricking the IDE, you can definitely ruin solutions & project files in a very hard to debug way if you ever need to manually update those files.
> I don't think I've ever 'bricked' my IDE. How does one go about bricking an IDE?
Visual Studio major version updates (uninstall old plus install new) used to be a good way to do that and often wreak havoc on the overall stability of your system as well. At least, on a system where you didn't want to strip it to fresh OS install as an intermediate step.
Just yesterday I had a similar issue with Resharper, where our local licence server was down for the day. Luckily I was able to enable a 30-day trial. (and I guess Resharper isn't that mandatory to get work done)