At the time of writing, the launch of Visual Studio 2005 is scheduled for the week of November 7th (and I hope that Microsoft’s weeks count 7 days like mine). Like many of you, I have installed the betas of Visual Studio (I installed it under Virtual PC to limit damages) to start playing with it, to explore new features.
This month, my column has a different content. Instead of focusing on a specific subject, I will give a 30,000 feet overview of many topics. In the following months, I will revisit some of these subjects like you are accustomed.
The list of features you will find here is not exhaustive. I have selected the features I like best.
New features in the code editor
The IntelliSense has been improved once again. It now offers hints to fix your code. This feature is known as Autocorrect.
The code editor now shows a yellow border on the left to show part of the code that have been modified but not saved.
XML code commenting is now supported natively in VB.Net (just like it was in C#). VB programmers now don’t have any excuses not to comment their code!
A code snippets library is available to easily insert commonly used block of code into your project.
New features in the Forms designer
Many programmers (and count me in) had hard time when docking the many dialogs of the IDE. You will be happy to dock your dialogs. When you start dragging a dialog, guides and hints appear and you simply need to click an arrow to get your dialog docked exactly where you want.
It will now be easier to align two controls together (like a label to a textbox) with the Snap Lines that appears when you move a control around another.
Figure 1: Docking a tool dialog has never been easier!
New controls
Every new version of the tool brings its lot of new or revisited controls. Here are some new controls that Visual Studio 2005 is now offering.
The Strip controls are not a single control but a family of controls that will all work together. Controls like the ToolStrip (replaces the ToolBar), the StatusStrip (replaces StatusBar), the MenuStrip (replaces the MainMenu), and the ContextMenuStrip (replaces the ContextMenu) are an improvement over their previous version. They all have more options and are all working much the same way so that when you teach one you know most of the others by the same time.
The WebBrowser control is a wrapper around the Internet Explorer’s ActiveX browser control. A managed HTML DOM (document object model) wraps most commonly used pieces of the full IE DOM (so chances are that you will need to rely on the IE DOM to do your job).
The GridView Control is a major improvement over the DataGrid control. Columns can now be TextBox, ComboBox, CheckBox, Link, Button, or Image. Colors and fonts can now be changed on individual cells.
The MaskedTextBox control is good but not perfect. If your mask is something like a US zip code, then it is working perfectly. If you enter a Canadian postal code mask (L0L 0L0), fill it and try to use the Delete button, it won’t works as you want. Decimal inputs are also very deceptive.
New keywords
This new version comes with its load of new keywords. Be sure to have a look in the help file for Continue (used in loops), IsNot (is now an operator), the Using keyword, the My namespace, the Partial attributes for classes. Generic classes will also be something you will want to have a look at.
Finally, the Strongly Typed Configuration Settings will be very useful. Instead of having to remember each keyword of our settings’ file, IntelliSense will show them and we will also be sure that their data type is OK (an integer setting will contain an integer value). A designer will also let us fill this file more easily.
New deployment feature
Anyone tried and was fully satisfied with the “One-Touch deployment”? I wasn’t. VS2005 now includes the ClickOnce deployment which is a real improvement over the previous version. ClickOnce allows Windows Forms based client applications to be downloaded & run over the Network or the Web. The bad part of this new technology is that the .Net Framework 2.0 will have to get installed on the client before trying to run the application. ClickOnce is offering flexibility in the distribution of your updates. You decide if the updates are done automatically before the application starts or you can use an API to do it yourself from within your application. Notice that applications deployed through ClickOnce do not required users to always be connected to the network as a local version of the application can be downloaded and executed locally.
My favorite new feature
Last but not least, the edit and continue is back. That was the feature that I really missed in the previous versions of VS.Net. You will now be able to change some of your code while you are debugging it without having to restart your project to have your modifications effective. For programmers that started with VS.Net this is an improvement but for VB veterans that have used VB6, it is a return to the good old days!
Now the bad news
The title of this section is a bit misleading but after all these new things I needed to let you think there were some bad things! I didn’t found any real bad news. Visual Studio is a real improvement over the previous (compared to big service pack that Visual Studio .Net 2003 was). That may explain why no very special upgrade price are announced yet (at time of writing, the announced upgrade price for Visual Studio 2005 Professional available is $549 (USD)).
Conclusion
If you want to read more, I invite you to browse http://msdn.microsoft.com/vbasic/2005/. Two free books are also available from Microsoft:
Visual Studio 2005 promises to be more productive for developers. The learning curve for current VS.Net developers won’t be that much has you can continue to do much of what you are doing today the same way.
I hope you appreciated the topic and see you next month.