Skip to main content

Ode to Visual Studio Express Edition

Using the Visual Studio Express editions to build a software product is a delight. I have been using Visual Studio for years, and can testify to the great quality of Microsoft's development tools. When asked about my favorite application all categories, I always answer VS. With the latest Express editions, Microsoft have outdone themselves again. Beside making the IDE available for free, there are many important new features in this package.

My hands-down favorite feature must be the built-in refactoring support. I have been a huge fan of Martin Fowler's landbreaking book "Refactoring", since its publication in 1999. Since I have been mainly developing in C/C++ during my development career, I have not had the privilege of using any refactoring tool professionally. (refactoring is dependent on reflection support, which is difficult to achieve, if not impossible, in C++ with all of its powerful features). With the advent of .NET and the initial versions of Visual Studio .NET, came the first 3rd party commercial refactoring tools, which were pretty decent but costly. I am very pleased to see Microsoft taking this step and integrating refactoring support within the IDE. The most common refactoring, "Extract Method" (to make a selected part of a method a new method) is included as well as "Rename class/method/variable". The only refactorings I am really missing from this basic package are "Extract Subclass" (to create a new class from a set of class methods) and "Move Method" (to move a method to a different class).

Other neat new things I like about the Express edition are the keyboard customizations, code snippets and code templates.

OK, that's all fine and dandy, but what can be improved? Well, I realize we are talking about first-class software that is being given away free of charge here, but it is still annoying me to see that there is no way to integrate source control in the Express editions. I would have liked to run the free Subversion system integrated in C# Express. It is also annoying that add-ons are not officially supported, although a few notable exceptions exist: nUnit and SQLite are both using unofficial workarounds to enable their components to integrate with the Express Editions.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

HOWTO: Fix a Broken Laptop Lid for $1

A few months ago my laptop lid's hinges gave up and my lid kept falling over. I will show you how I fixed the problem in five minutes by using materials for $1. But first some background info. At first, I assumed there would be a quick and simple fix to this common laptop problem. My laptop is an Evo N800v. HP has bought Compaq since I purchased the computer so that's where I'm supposed to turn for help. I was kind of startled to hear that HP support wanted $500 for fixing the broken hinges - presumably they intended to replace the entire lid. Obviously, shelling out $500 for fixing a 6 year old laptop is not the way to go, so I started to look for alternative solutions. First, I disassembled the laptop numerous times, trying to make the hinges more sturdy (that's spelled S-U-P-E-R-G-L-U-E). Anyway, that didn't help. Option number two was to do something similar to what user xrobevansx did on instructables.com . Basically he bought a lid support in a hardware store...
19 comments
Read more

HOWTO: GTD with Google Docs & PocketMod

Take control of your unwieldy to do-list by combining Google Docs and PocketMod. With the system described here you will always be ready to take notes, and never run the risk of losing an idea! Update (July 30, 2009): Now using a Google Docs template. I use a subset of GTD (" Getting Things Done ") by having a digital copy of my next actions, sorted by context (@Home, @Office, @Shopping, @Computer, etc.). This lets me easily look up what I need to do, depending on where I am. However, a digital copy is not very useful by itself, since it is not accessible when I am offline. Putting it in my PDA is not ideal either, since the overhead of adding a new note is too big (turning on the device, opening the right application, having it recognize my handwriting). That's why I print out my to-do list on paper once a week and carry it in my pocket. It's the ideal way of accessing and editing tasks. Before I print out a new list I spend a minute or two copying the edits from my...
5 comments
Read more

Reading on Paper vs. on Screen

One of the basic premises behind FeedJournal is that it's better to read text on paper than on a screen. While it might not sound like a bold assumption, it still is an assumption and as such worth to examine deeper. Today, office workers and many other professionals are required to focus their eyes on a computer screen during most of their work day. Many of them continue to use the computer at home. FeedJournal was created with many goals in mind; one of them is to release you from the screen while enabling you to read the content you love. You shouldn't have to spend more time reading off a screen, just because you want to access fresh and relevant content. Recent research has found that reading a longer text on paper is 25% faster than reading the same text on a computer screen. At the same time, reading comprehension and article overview are improved. Although screen resolutions have increased and font rendering technologies such as ClearType make it much easier to rea...
11 comments
Read more