Gareth's Weblog

Whidbey and C#

I don't get to use C# much, but I do really like C# and .NET. An article published by MSDN (Dated November, but linked today from MSDN Just Published has a sneak preview of the new changes.

I'm pretty impressed, and a few of the things I like are editor specific, so I hope they make their way into the C++ stuff. Here are some of the things that interested me:

• Anonymous Methods: Basically allowing you to pass bits of code where you could pass delegates, which is pretty nifty
• Support for 'Refactoring': Basically text editor support for making big changes to a class easily. A lot less error prone than the typical Search/Replace. Something like this would make Hungarian notation less of a problem.
• Profiles: I was actually in the process of writing a tool like this for Visual Studio.NET 2003, so I guess I will bin that. I hate having to setup my colours and keyboard all the time. Hopefully this will also solve the annoying bug in 2k3 where the keyboard settings randomly change.
• Change tracking: Every other editor on the planet has had this; it's about time Visual Studio got the feature. Basically it marks which lines were added, and which were changed during this session.

There are other new things, but those are the ones that stand out for me. They are also adding more Visual Assist like features, but I will still keep using Visual Assist, because they don't seem to have gotten it all, especially with VAX on the horizon.