Marketplace reviews
Visual Studio .NET Professional
James first started this website when learning Visual Basic back in 1999 whilst studying his GCSEs. The site grew steadily over the years while being run as a hobby - to a regular monthly audience of over half a million unique developers. In July '08 James left his job as Head of Development at a digital agency in London to focus his energies on developerFusion full-time.
- Introduction
- Code Editor & Designer
- Debugging & Tools
- Conclusion
Introduction
The launch of Visual Studio .NET in early February marked a radical overhaul for the entire Visual Studio range, both in terms of the underlying architecture, and the rapid development environment. The product is now based on the .NET Framework, which brings significant benefits for developers. However, for the first time ever, the compilers for the Microsoft languages are available for free by downloading the Framework SDK; by purchasing Visual Studio .NET you are no longer paying for the languages, but only the IDE and it's associated tools. As a result, developers are no longer restricted to using this IDE; in fact, the whole development process could take place using Notepad and a command line prompt. For the moment, however, Visual Studio .NET is the only rapid development tool for serious Microsoft developers, and this latest release only serves to consolidate its position.
The .NET Framework, and as a result, Visual Studio.NET comes with two new languages; C# and VB.net; and has the possibility of increasing support when other vendors release a .NET version of another language. Just a quick warning to VB programmers at this stage; you may well have been wondering why I called VB.net a "new" language... however, the language has had such a major overhaul in order to make it a truly object orientated language, that it can't be seen as anything else. As a result of these changes Visual Studio .NET will not necessarily be able to open and run your old VB projects; although it does have a conversion wizard, don't expect the transition to be easy for anything but the most basic projects.
The Visual Basic Upgrade Wizard
Installation was painless, but lengthy, with 5 CD's worth in the Professional edition. The first difference immediately noticable is you only have 2 main shortcuts created, reflecting the fact that Visual Studio is now a truly integrated development environment... from web services, sql server projects and client applications, everything can be managed from within the single IDE.
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Events coming up
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Nov
18
15 Minutes of Fame
Dresher, United States
This is a yearly tradition. We select 10 of the favorite speakers from monthly meetings, code camps, and hands on labs. Each one does a 15 minute talk on their favorite .NET technology. This is our 10th anniversary so we plan a gala event with special prizes and refreshments.
I use VS 2005 Team Edition in a big projekt. I find this IDE a step backward. Refactoring functions are painful (i.e. why, when I want to rename local variable in a function, it tries to rename all ocurrences in whole solution?) To add functions known from Eclipse (i.e. error highliting while coding - this is most useful to me, advanced finding usages, i.e. going direct to inheritors, super-fast finding of classes with a list of possible options while typing), you have to install separete Plugin. This is such a pity, while this consumes much memory. With big project, such as our, overall tool performance is bad. In my team are colleagues, which in other projects worked with Java and Eclipse. Their opinion is, that Eclipse is much better. Not to insult anybody. We use it for developing client-server application, where client is desktop (winforms) application. I've heard, that VS is very helpful when working with ASP. My company has no big experience with this technology, we used mainly Java so far.
However, at that page says
"Visual Studio .NET does not support Edit and Continue for Visual Basic or Visual C# code."
You can debug while your editing..
You have to change your options,
here's how to
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/vsdebug/html/vxurfeditcontinuedebuggingoptionsdialogbox.asp
PS It's called Edit and Continue
I'm relatively new to .NET, I have programmed in VB 6 on and off for a few years and I find the main annoyance for me is the inability to enter code while debugging, you can't even comment out lines. I'm not even sure if you can skip over lines of code while debugging. I'm finding it very frustrating. Does anybody know of any work arounds. Another gripe is do people notice how difficult it is to find even the most basic information on Microsoft and other products online these days.
I began programming a year ago with Visual Basic 6, after becoming very much used to the VB6 interface, using VB.NET is a huge shock to the rituals. Visual Basic is like a totally new language. For example, something as simple as changing a Form's Back ground colour is now: Form1.BackColor = System.Drawing.Color.Red which is a lot more complex than what it is.
VB.NET is as good as a new language, but will give new programmers a boost in learning other languages, such as the hyped C#.
Personally, I still prefer VB6, but along with all the changes, VB.NET is a lot more powerfull. I've got both VS6 and VS.NET installed, so I can get the best of both worlds, although I think I will be a complete .NET programmer within the next few months.
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