Kirill Grouchnikov's Blog

"Totally splendid variable-renaming facility" in Visual Studio 2005

Comments

• Most of my friends use Visual Studio and I'm getting tired to hear them tell me what cool stuff Microsoft invented. I remember when I had to explain them that code folding is older than us and that VS.NET did not invent it.

  Posted by: gfx on October 27, 2005 at 11:46 AM

• "Hmmm, are we talking about Ctrl+Space that has been like, forever, in Java IDEs?"

  Hmmmm, okay - can somebody confirm that a Java IDE had intellisense before the Visual Basic IDE?

  Posted by: applebanana8 on October 28, 2005 at 02:27 AM

• Umm... I totally agree with all your rants, except the bit about IntelliSense. I was using IntelliSense in Visual C++ in 1998, which was a full four years before a worthwhile Java IDE came out. All of us are now spoiled by IDEA and Eclipse, but do you all remember how God-awful Java IDEs used to be?

  Posted by: actionboy on October 28, 2005 at 08:38 AM

• (applebanana8/actionboy) That said, code completion/IntelliSense is way ahead in Java IDEs than in VS.NET. MS might have invented it, but since then they've not done much innovation.

  What pains me the most when seeing VS users at work is how much trouble they go to navigating code. They might have a drop-down box listing methods in a class, but other than that it's mostly Ctrl+F, F3.
  

  Posted by: sumitkishore on October 28, 2005 at 08:44 AM

• Automated refactoring was absolutly unknown to Microsoft until now and still, VS betas are far behind eclipse, idea or any of the java IDE out there. The fact that Mr Petzold is amazed by the variable renaming utility (which he has no name for :) ) probes me right. That's not to mention eclipse quick fixes and alikes. IMHO VS just sucks.

  Posted by: edovale on October 28, 2005 at 08:58 AM

• Most people don't look outside their ecosystem. A friend of mine was at PDC 2003 and talked to a lot of microsoft people that promoted the rather primitive refactoring tools in VS "Whidbey", now 2005. He told them about the stuff available in IDEA. Shrug. They simply didn't know. They were convinced the stuff in VS was the newest and coolest.

  But hey, how many people know Smalltalk's refactoring browser?

  Posted by: mernst on October 28, 2005 at 10:22 AM

• 
  In fact, IntelliSense has become the first warning sign that you haven’t properly included a DLL reference or a using directive at the top of your code. You start typing and IntelliSense comes up with nothing. You know immediately something is wrong.

  
  You "immediately" know, after you've pressed ctrl-space (which you were expecting to work, obviously). Then you back up, change one letter, press ctrl-space again, mash the keyboard, try it again, do the chicken dance, hit it again ...

  
  As Visual Studio is generating code, it is also erecting walls between that code and the programmer.

  
  I really like this point, and the rest of his talk, about not letting VS generate all the boilerplate for you. Start with an empty project and do it yourself. As an IntelliJ/Textpad/Commandline person, I don't like it when the IDE hides the directory structure, and VS is particularly horrible about this.
  

  Posted by: jsando on October 28, 2005 at 10:26 AM

• In all fairness... after trying VisualCrappe and after Kawa was removed from the market.. I settled back to my VisualStudio v5.0 for my Java development. I did this for quite a while until I discovered JEdit. Then Eclipse finally convinced me to switch with its debugger.

  Posted by: dog on October 28, 2005 at 03:55 PM

• (actionboy): I really don't think that 2002 was the first time that a worthwhile Java IDE emerged. We were using JBuilder/JDeveloper around '98 and most Java IDEs migrated to actually BEING Java applications around '99. The first Java IDE that I remember using was Optima++, which could generate C++ and Java source, but was renamed to Power++ and eventually split to PowerJ in 97/98. I have always heard that Netbeans was the first Java IDE, which appears to be confirmed here: http://www.netbeans.org/about/history.html
  

  Posted by: evickroy on October 28, 2005 at 11:16 PM

• Well, I have had 6 years of Java experience before I was engaged in C# / .NET 1.1 / VS 2003 project for 4 months. My opinion is:

  1. C# is on pair with Java, somewhere better (using/IDisposable, delegates/events, properties/indexers, ICloneable done right), somewhere worse (checked exceptions, annonimus and non static inner classes, primitive wrappers, static imports...).

  2. CLR is solid, but edged by modern JVMs.

  3. VS2003 is out of league of modern Java IDEs (IDEA, Eclipse and JBuilder), but with the addition of JetBrains ReSharper it manages to come close but not catch. I can't judge improvements in VS2005 as didn't have a chance to take a look at it.

  4. At the end, nothing compares with Java APIs, libraries, frameworks and community!

  Posted by: mcekovic on October 29, 2005 at 02:30 PM

• I seem to remember it being in other products before it made it into VB - I think Access was the first MS product with this feature.
  Kirill I think you should have a closer look at the article since you seem to be on the ball with the new window bar thingy. It sounded to me like the aim of at least one of those dynamic layouts was to act as a magnifying glass - leaving components in their proper x/y coordinate relationship. Which could be fairly difficult to do in Java? (Maybe paint the component to an offscreen buffer and then use Java 2d to scale / transmogrify it???)
  I had to laugh at the slashdotters who were accussing Mr Petzold of windows bashing and FUD. They need to be slapped with a history book (or better yet 'Programming Windows 3.1' becuase it is bigger than most history books :D ).

  Posted by: rickcarson on October 30, 2005 at 05:39 PM

• With talk about Visual Studio 2005 shipping too early, it's a good thing our favorite open source Java tools are developed very carefully.

  Posted by: mparaz on November 12, 2005 at 01:18 AM

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.