Wow, incredible stuff. I attended a Windows Forms demo this morning, where many of the new features of Visual Studio 2005 (“Whidbey”) were demonstrated to spectacular effect.
Here are some quick notes I jotted down:
Dialog Editor
Holy crap. The dialog editor can snap controls to alignment. I knew this from the PDC bits. However, what’s new is the control auto-spacing, matching Windows design guidelines. If that weren’t enough, they provide guidelines for different control types so the fonts all align, even though the frames of the controls may differ. Are you kidding me?
You can edit common string properties without going to the properties menu. I could swear I saw this before, perhaps in Sheridan’s VBAssist from the old days? Anyway, cool feature.
FRefactoring support pervades the designer, the code editor, the property editor and the solution explorer. Changing class names ripples through everything.
For VB, the “My application” project designer was cool. Most of the functions yoiu might set in an installer were part of the project properties, enabling seemless distribution later on, with ClickOnce, for instance.
Toolstrip control is cool.
SmartTags are cool. You can perform common actions on various controls that support it, which seems like most or all of the out of box components.
Partial Types allow you to put user and designer code in separate files. This has some profound benefits, allowing you to take advantage of some of their code generation features without worrying about blowing away your customizations.
Security
I was blown away by the “Calculate Permissions” feature, where VS iterates over your code and suggests permissions that will be needed.
They even integrated this notion of required permissions into Intellisense, to the point where you are warned when you are about to call a method that will require permissions you aren’t set up for. Oh yeh, you can set up a debug sandbox, where you can similate the permissions you plan on deploying with.
“PC in the wild”, allowing the user to acknowledge possible problems that can be detected at install time (like permissions needed, but not initially granted due to deployment config).
More to come…
Posted by Nick Codignotto at March 24, 2004 07:21 PM | TrackBack