Give me some feedback!

So I've been doing a lot more work in Visual Studio 2005 lately, and I've noticed something truly strange: there's absolutely no progress indication aside from an animated icon in the status bar.

Yes, it's nice to know that it's still doing something by having a whopping three to five frames of animation in the status area. However, that's pretty worthless to me -- I *know* it's still compiling since it's using 100% of my CPU. What I am most interested in is what percentage of compiling is done and what's left?

I can understand that for very small projects, a progress indicator is useless. It would just flash and you'd probably waste more cycles to do that than it's worth. Just skip the indicator if the compile is going to happen very quickly (which does take some foresight to determine). However, when you have a large project, the progress indicator is a must.

What's truly mind-boggling to me is that there are very simple metrics for progress indication in C/C++. 1) How many lines of code have you compiled vs how many lines are left? Yes, C/C++ isn't line based. I know that there are people out there who are childish enough to write their entire application on a single line and then file a bug report about the progress indicator not being helpful. However, the vast majority of programmers out there actually want to accomplish something aside from making a point and their applications are split into multiple lines (and over multiple files). 2) Multiple files also makes for a reasonable metric. If you have 1000 files to compile and you're on #3, then chances are, you have a fair amount of work left to do. 3) Bytes of data left to compile would work as well. It's trivial to calculate, and is slightly more indicative of work load.

I realize that all of these methods can be picked apart as to why they're not right. However, this isn't about being 100% right. It's about providing some margin of feedback to the user. It's something the file system and networking people have known for years. It'd be nice if the VS team caught on as well.

When you start a large file transfer from one disk to another, or a download from one machine to another, you have no pre-ordained knowledge of how long it's going to take. However, that doesn't stop the designers for providing the user with a progress indicator that at least makes a stab at it. Sure, it's not 100% right and it's not always that helpful in an exacting sense. But it still tells the user what's going on and gives them a broad overview of progress, which is all that's really important.

So come on Visual Studio team... give me some feedback, will ya?