Several bugs evident in Visual Studio

[maverick808]

I've noticed these bugs in Visual Studio, but they are probably evident in many other apps too.

1) The mouse icon does not correctly change color to show itself on any background. Normally with text on a dark background the mouse text cursor changes to white. On Visual Studio if you set a dark background (e.g. green code on a black background) the text cursor will change to white whilst over the text. With Fusion, the cursor stays black regardless of the background color, making it impossible to see the cursor at all whenever there is any text on a black background.

2) In the GUI editor in Visual Studio there is a Toolbox tab on the left of the screen that pops out when you mouse over it. It has all the widgets for designing apps and normally you pull the widget you want off the toolbox and drop it onto your Form/Panel/Whatever. When doing this in Fusion there is an easily reproducible mouse bug that occurs.

If you drag any widget off the toolbox directly onto the form then the toolbox tab correctly slides away to hide itself and you can drop the widget onto your form fine. However, if you drag any widget off the Toolbox and do not immediately enter the Form area then the mouse icon starts flickering constantly between two different states and the Toolbox does not disappear. If your form is completely hidden by the toolbox then it becomes impossible to drop widgets onto as the toolbox never slides back in.

See the first attached pic for further explanation.

3) When toolboxes do slide back correctly they often leave redraw errors on whatever was underneath. This can be seen in the second attached image in which it is clear that the Exit and Tools buttons, that are normally a very smooth texture, are quite messed up.

[admin]

1) The mouse icon does not correctly change color to

show itself on any background.

OS X doesn't support XOR cursors[/url]

I don't know about the other issues.

[admin]

Interesting, thanks for the report.

1: It's the XOR problem, but I (respectfully) disagree with Ben on what we should do about it: He says "The only way to fix it would be to disable the hardware cursor and render our own cursor in software whenever an AND/XOR cursor would be used" and goes on to say it would be slower; IMHO that's exactly what we should do. Slow and correct is better than fast and incorrect; a fast invisible cursor isn't so helpful! The workaround in the thread that Eric linked will help (namely, svga.noHWCursor = "YES") but we can and should do better.

2 and 3: Are you running in Unity mode, or fullscreen or windowed? I can't think of how we'd be causing #3, but #2 could be related to our drag & drop code. If you end the VMwareUser process in the VM, do you still see this problem? (That's a relatively blunt approach; if it does help, we can try a more subtle way of disabling it.)

[maverick808]

1: Thanks. I'm glad it's being considered, as I personally find it annoying in VS and I'm sure others experience it in other apps. Thanks also for pointing out the workaround, which works perfectly.

2 & 3: I tested in Unity, fullscreen and windowed and both these bugs occur in all view modes. Killing VMwareUser doesn't seem to make any difference and both bugs still occur. Personally, I find the flicker bug particularly annoying as it interferes with the functionality of Visual Studio (I can't drop widgets onto small forms unless I pin the toolbox tab so it is always visible). The redraw bug, 3, doesn't bother me at all, but I thought I should point it out as if it occurs in other apps graphic designers use then it would be an important issue.