Visual Studio 2005 includes a huge amount of new functionality ranging from code snippets to refactoring. But does it get everything done that everyone wants? Of course not. As Steven Wright says, “You can’t have everything. Where would you put it all?” Some industry leaders don’t want everything, but they’ve got some great ideas on a few things which should be added into the next version of Visual Studio.
Contributors to this round of the series are:
- James Avery, Principal of Infozerk, Inc., author of Visual Studio Hacks, and host of this website.
- Ben Carey, Senior Consultant at Statera Consulting in Denver Colorado
- Kate Gregory, founding partner of Gregory Consulting Limited
- Bill Wagner, Founder/Consultant with SRT Solutions and author of “Effective C#”
Ben Carey says, “Overall, I’ve been very happy with the new version of Visual Studio, but there are a few enhancements and new features that I would like to see in upcoming versions.” It’s not surprising that Carey, who emphatically listed ReSharper as his favorite add-in for an earlier Ask The Pros installment, wants to see “additional named refactorings. I love the new refactoring support, but there are many additional refactorings that I use frequently that I would like to see integrated into Visual Studio.”
Carey would also like to see some performance improvements in the refactoring area. “I’m also hoping that many of the refactorings get faster in future releases. It seems that a handful of the refactorings could perform drastically faster just by taking into account how their respective items are scoped.”
Better integration for MSBuild rates high on Carey’s list, too. “I would also like to see better IDE support for MSBuild. It’s great that we have MSBuild as a foundation, but the IDE support is lacking. I’m comfortable modifying the XML directly, but I would like to have visual tools to orchestrate the build process (especially in the context of multiple projects and custom targets).”
James Avery would like to see one feature which Eclipse, a well-known Java development environment, supports: “I would love to see support for automatically updating add-ins. This is one of the features from Eclipse that I think is very cool. You can simply enter a URL and the add-in will be downloaded, then when there are changes it can be set to automatically keep it up to date.”
Like Carey, Avery would like to see improvements in Visual Studio’s refactoring functionality. “I would also like to see even more support for refactoring, perhaps even a templating solution, especially one that is a little bit quicker. The current refactoring sometimes takes just as long as doing the job manually would. Speaking of refactoring I think its time that the Extensibility Object Model got a good working over, currently it is pretty hard to use without keeping the documentation close at hand. It would also be nice to have a new source control interface that supported edit/merge/commit.”
Finally, Avery thinks “A C# automation solution would also be nice, either Macros or some combination of Macros and templates would be excellent.”
Bill Wagner, who gave great debugging tips in an earlier ATP article, wants better debugging support. “I really want to see some fine-control over thread context switches. Debugging possible race conditions is especially tricky, and reproducing them in a debugger environment is even more so. I’d like the ability to tell the debugger to execute a thread switch at a particular statement, and to switch back again at a particular statement in that thread.”
Wagner, who admits he “still finds multi-threaded programming a bit of a pain,” is very clear about the benefits of such an improvement: “It would make it much easier to verify bugs that show up only with certain race conditions. Once those are verified, it would make the fix easier to verify as well.”
Kate Gregory follows up her previous tips on debugging with ideas for improving team development communications: “I want to be able to right-click a line of code and select ‘Who wrote this?’. I know that information should be in the source control system, and I want it! On a multi-developer project, some code is so awful you must immediately know who to find and beat— ah, have an open and frank exchange of views with.”
Spell-checking and Intellisense support in comments rates high for Gregory. “This would actually be pretty tricky to implement because if I use a variable name in a comment I would like intellisense to help me on that, but at the same time I want an office-like autocorrect to handle things like separate/seperate or variable/varible that certain devs in my shop are constantly getting wrong.”
Lastly, Gregory would like Visual Studio to have more assistance when developing for SharePoint. “It’s pretty much the last kind of work where I need to have several other windows (a command prompt, some windows explorer windows for file copies, the gac, …) open as well as Visual Studio.“ She admits her wish list for that particular feature area is “a bit too long” for an Ask The Pros article…
Ask The Pros is an ongoing series with new installments every three or four weeks.
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