Visual Studio Fanboys
July 25th, 2007A line has formed around building 42 at the Microsoft campus as anxious developers await the release of Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2. The word on the street is that it will be coming out any time this week so it could be a couple more wet, cold nights in Redmond. Microsoft appreciates the dedication and is hosting a Matrix trilogy projected onto the building tonight to help the fanboys pass the time. I wonder if they had Visual Studio in the Matrix. And what would Neo's code look like? I bet his color scheme would be hot. But I digress.
Ok, so there is no line, that I know of, but I am definitely anxious to start using it. I will just download it from MSDN once it is out. My main need at the moment is the Javascript support that it will provide. I have become accustom to Intellisense in C#, VB and even XML and not having it in while I work with Javascript has made me feel like I am back in a terminal window hacking Perl in vi. I try to get by with as little code as possible because I know it will not be easy to maintain.
Today I renamed a method in one source file and had to make sure any calls to it are updated as well. My refactoring process was to press Ctrl-Shift-F to search the entire project for any mention of the old method name and then change while trying to determine that it is the same context of the update method. Fortunately it is just a little bit of Javascript so far. With Intellisense and refactoring support I could just as easily be doing this work in Notepad. (or Notepad2)
But the wait is almost over. I plan to start using it right away. And that is reasonably possible because of the new multi-targeting support in Visual Studio 2008. I can continue to work with .NET 2.0 and 3.0 applications instead of making the jump to the final .NET 3.5 release that will be out in late February.
