Whidbey Technical Preview... wow

[Nerseus]

I've just finished installing the Whidbey technical preview on my home machine so I have more time to "play". Whidbey is the next version of Visual Studio (due in 2005). There is some seriously cool stuff in there!

 

For one, partial classes. Similar to C++, you can now split class code among separate files. Class getting too big? Split it out.

 

Basic Refactoring is now built in. Items like "Extract Method", "Promote to Interface" and more are there and VERY easy to use. If you've never heard of refactoring, check out this book.

 

You can now rename a method and have Visual Studio go and find all references to the new name and update them. You can reorder parameters to a method and it will reorder the params passed to the method wherever you called it.

 

You can now use Generics - similar to C++ templates. Rather than create a whole Collection class just to get a type-safe collection, you can use a template to define a variable as a typed collection. That alone will save me a TON of code.

 

Another feature I haven't played with much yet is generic value types. You can create a Nullable int. So you can define the variable i as a Nullable int and use it exactly like an int. If you don't define it it will have a method like NullValue that returns true/false. So, no more questions on "does 0 represent a "null" int or should I use int.MinValue?". Awesome.

 

They haven't added it yet, but I hope there's a way to specify the Output Type (win EXE or class library) as a configuration param. So, Release mode makes a class library while Debug mode makes an EXE.

 

Also, if you've ever wrestled with the docking windows in Visual Studio, trying to get the properties window below the Solution Explorer or the Watch Window just right... they've redesigned how you dock windows. See the screenshot below - you now have little popup thingies that show you just where to drop a window.

 

There are about 500 options on how to format your code, if you want to tweak indents (case, switch, the lines after a case, brackets, etc.).

 

That's all for now... just totally impressed and can't wait to start using this next year!

 

-nerseus

[bri189a]

Where can the rest of us attain a copy? Looks like cool stuff that I want to 'play' with too.

[mocella]

I was at MSDN last week and also saw some of the new features. I'm also quite excited about built-in refactoring. The "My" namespace and ready-to-use code-snippets in VB were also pretty interesting additions to the suite.

 

We also got a sneak-peek at SQL Yukon (is that what they're still calling it?), and there was definitely some mixed reactions to the new dll stored procedures - where you write the "stored procedure" in Visual Studio then deploy that dll to the SQL Server.

[Nerseus]

The Technical Release version of Whidbey is available to MSDN Universal subscribers, I believe. There may be other options - that's how I got it.

 

Yukon is the name of the next SQL Server and it supports writing procs in C#, though I've heard pros/cons about flexibility vs. performance (C# stored procs being slow). Haven't played with Longhorn yet.

 

To finish the triage, Longhorn is the next version of Windows.

 

There's also Avalon and a few other codenames for upcoming releases of MS products. There is, in fact, a codename for the version of Visual Studio that comes out AFTER Whidbey (which is due in 2005). How would you feel to be on a team developing Whidbey, the next "big thing" and before it's even released you're already outdated? :)

 

-Nerseus

[laredo512]

That's the only thing I detest from MS... They stick you with VS 6.0 for years and now... voila 1 new version of the programming suite every 1-2 years...

 

I have the oddest sensation that tells me to wait until 2010 comes out before upgrading. :p

 

But I digress, I cant wait to see 2005. I beleive ppl can download the Beta 1 release on http://www.microsoft.com/vstudio

[Nerseus]

I have the beta 1 of Team System (is that right?) at work. We're trying to find a server to put it on so we can start using it. It looks/sounds awesome!

 

-ner

[PlausiblyDamp]

Try 2 or 3 servers for Team System! Different parts are built against different versions of the framework and SQL 2005 is required with it's own version apparently.

Also another nice feature in VS 2005 is the shortcusts in the IDE - things like if you are creating an exception class just type exception and hit tab and watch it fill out a basic exception class and automatically overload the constructor etc.

[BlackStone]

You can order VS 2005 Enterprise Edition at the VS beta site. I like a lot of the new and updated features, most of all being the updating syntax highlighting and code-completion for C#. Edit and continue is also supported, as well as temporary projects like in VB6. Many times in VS 2002-3 I wanted to just try out a piece of code, but I had to have a whole solution set up and saved in my projects folder just to do that.

 

You can also download the Express editions of each language on the site. It is missing some features from the full visual studio though.

The site is here.

[Robby]

I had tested VS2005 on a seperate partition a couple of months ago, fell in love and now it's on a fresh partition along with Win2k3 and many other goodies. (...and 4 hours later, I'm done)