Ugh. Classes.

Ugh. Classes sucking up any free time.

Argh

So, I know its still Beta and it is pretty good feature wise but argh!!!

I did something … have no idea what but now with every single action the IDE crashes. No errors, no messages, nothing. Just closes period.

Damn it.

More Features

Wow, I’m impressed with all the new features (in VS 2005).

The code editor itself is so much better. Intellisense has gotten really really intelligent and it knows a lot more context (I think – it’s been a while since I used VS 2003) … it will go to the most likely thing you want even before typing the first letter for some things. All the refactoring features! You’ll feel like… wow, I used to do this all by hand before? Basics like renaming, extracting methods, etc – so very nice. And of course, being SmartTags makes them just in your way when needed and out of your way when not needed. One small but really sweet feature is auto insertion of delegate signatures and handlers.

An excellent job with the WebBrowser as well. Most of the things most people will need are here. Can make a very decent IE interface clone (one that isn’t crappy) really fast. All really needed events and properties are here. I was able to add autodiscovery of RSS feeds with about 5 lines of code an in about 5 min.

Again, slightly disappointed at lack of power in particular controls like TabControl. Also, one thing that really should have been there is in IDE support for auto-generating code from XSDs and vice-versa. Not that big of a deal though.

Really wish I had more time to mess around with this but got to work on some school work and some stuff for ITS.

Back

Back from the week and back in school for summer. Project in Software Systems sounds like its going to be fun – get to work with a company for one of their projects. Meanwhile, Technical Writing sounds tedious and what I’d imagine it to be.

Meanwhile, finally going to get the chance to play around with VS 2005. Decided to make a quick News Aggregator to go through its features. So far, its been really nice. The VS team has done an excellent job I think with this new one. Started by building XSDs for OPML and RSS (prob. won’t use them but I think it was a nice exercise). The visual schema editor is a really nice addition. The text XML editor is itself very nice. All the debugging features offered for XML itself are very useful and quickly becoming invaluable.

The Windows Forms Designer is awesome too. Smart-tags are pretty nice and quite useful. The new toolstrips and the better layout controls are really awesome. However, I really wish they’d given the tab control an update as well. Something that resembles the VS ones would have definitely been nice. Also, the dockable windows and layout offered in VS itself also would have been nice. But, I must say what is included is pretty nice.

The Office Look and Feel sample doesn’t seem to work with the beta 2 but probably requires a few minor changes only. Decided to do a few custom controls including tabs and the Outlook style message list.