[Visual Haskell] Experiences and some clear bugs

Hi!

I did quick test run with Visual Haskell and I have collected my
negative experiences to
this mail.  In general, it seemed very nice tool, and this mail
shouldn't be considered
rejection of it for my part (it is just list of problems I had.)

License - if it is BSD, as announcement and documentation says, please make it
so installer.

Help files don't show up in any other mode than "no filter", and after
trying to use that
mode with "index" and "search" while Visual Haskell was installed, my
IDE started
using external viewer program instead of built-in panels.  Something
is sneaky in there.

Having a haskell file open file without any associated haskell project
almost invariably
ends up with at least some error messages in task list, here are the
ones I remember.
  * Missing modules, and it seemed that last imported module was always reported
    missing, even if was standard.
  * Having {-# OPTIONS -ffi -}  (Note missing #) resulted in internal
crash error (IDE didn't
    go down,)

Next I will dive into Visual Studio/Cabal - the lengthier and less
clear part of my mail :)

Cabal as Visual Studio project file was slightly surprising.  It
certainly wasn't easy for me,
but I haven't used Cabal before.  First, let me show how I would, in
case I could use
Visual Haskell at work for commercial purposes, have files set up.
+work-space
-+repo
--+etc
----+visual-studio-solution-folder
--+lib
---+my-haskell-lib
-+build
-+bin
I hope ascii "graphics" are not totally screwed up.  There are few
things that simply don't
sit with Cabal or Visual Haskell.  First, my solution and project
files are in diffrent directory
than my sources.  Now, specifying this into Visual Haskell required
text editing Cabal-file,
but having ../../../lib/my-haskell-lib in there wasn't visually too
pleasing, and it crashed
Visual Haskell and this time it took IDE down.  After that I stopped
trying to work around,
because I was comfortable enough to compile from command line and
using IDE only as
editor.

It also seems that I cannot specify Cabal option -v to debug problems,
but I didn't look too
hard.  I also find that I'd rather have list of exported modules in
settings properties than
in module/sourcefile properties

A bit of guesswork, but here is my take the next problems I would have
had with Visual
Haskell/Cabal: I have my external libraries (modulo those coming with
compiler) all under
work-space-directory.  I don't want to install anything system- or user-wide or
compiler-wide.  So using Cabal for this part would be fairly hard and
require quite more
understanding how ghc saves and uses files than really necessary. 
Also because of
Cabal-file, it is impossible to use Configuration macros, but those
are only important
during big reordering and when creating a lot of projects.  I have
same string as path
for most of my projects in C++, and being able to select all projects
and change where
their stuff goes in few secs is sometimes nice.

It might also be nice that Haskell projects also had Debug/Release
builds, even if they
were exactly the same.  I am not sure at all how to invoke current
Visual Haskell projects
from command line build.

Sorry for rather lengthy mail.  Also, if I can somehow help or provide
more info..just
send me an email.  I am subscribed to the list, but I might not read it always.

--Esa Ilari Vuokko