Reasons why Visual Studio Sucks #3: Hard-to-overview build results
The build results window in Visual Studio is plain text. No color coding, no UI elements, just text. This means that you’ll have to scan and read the text to find out if the build was successful, slightly at fault, or a major fuckup. If I recall correctly, the entire build command is output to the window as well, with no soft wrapping, so that the actual error is probably a few thousand pixels to the right, meaning you’ll have to scroll left and right just to read the error message, or even find out if it was an error or a warning. Even if that’s not the case, it’s hard to get an overview over the build process in Visual Studio. There’s a completely different build results pane you can look at instead, which /does/ have color coding and a nice table view. However, you don’t get to see the entire error message, the pane is buggy and displays errors in weird order, and it doesn’t correlate the error to a specific file in a good way. And you can’t easilly get to the corresponding build command to read the exact details of the error.
Once again, please correct me if I’m wrong, even flame me if it’s appropriate. I don’t use Visual Studio that much, and this is mostly taken from memory.
In XCode, if you open the lower pane and click once on an error (double click takes you to the error in the code, as usual), the lower pane scrolls to reveal relevant compiler output.