May 2005 - Posts

• Visual Studio.NET IDE matures with 2005

  I find 2005 an absolute pleasure to work with sofar. Apart from some expected (this is only Beta 2) bugs I think they have done really well in maturing what was already there as well as adding some new very useful IDE enhancements. Just some of the stuff that I'm very happy with: One of my pet hates was the awful way in which VS.NET used to reformat HTML when you switch from "HTML" mode to "Design" mode. They have now seen the light and leave your timeously formatted HTML excactly as it was! The refactoring enhancements. I'm beginning to think that my decision - to wait for this release before splashing out $150 for ReSharper - might pay off. Schema based Intellisense for XML. I do a hell of a lot of XSLT work. This is going to make my life easier as a lot of my clients don't have XmlSpy (or similar), so I've had to code "in the dark" with VS.NET 2003. Its own FTP client. Very handy. No more CoffeeCup FTP. Whoohoo! Type based colour coding in code (sic). Ala ReSharper. Mmmm. Am I seeing a pattern here? Class diagrams with beautiful look and feel. I love this. Seamless and so easy to do. And you can refactor from these diagrams as well. Sweet! Code snippets. You can save snippets of code that you would use often. An XML/XSLT transform for instance. No more "moving menus". I know there are loads of other "deeper" improvements as well, but these superficial ones already impress me enough to consider the, no-doubt, hefty price tag! Any other neat IDE stuff this community should know about? Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it! Posted May 26 2005, 11:53 PM by attie with 2 comment(s) Filed under: C#, ASP.NET, Software community