When Microsoft Corp. rolls out a major tools release such as Visual Studio 2005, it isnt just equipping developers—its enlisting them.
Click here to read the full review of Visual Studio 2005.
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When Microsoft Corp. rolls out a major tools release such as Visual Studio 2005, it isnt just equipping developers—its enlisting them.
Every Visual Studio release since the debut of this line has had a compound agenda: Its always offered developers an attractively paved path of least resistance that indubitably increased productivity, but has also fostered acceptance of Microsofts current strategic direction. Visual Studio 2005, launched last month, is no exception. Even the expanded and redesigned Start page of the Visual Studio 2005 environment is an express invitation to join a movement rather than merely to write an application.
This is not entirely a criticism, but it is a critical point for developers to understand when weighing their alternatives—not just in choosing tools but also in adopting future application models.
Next Page: A platform proposition.
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A platform proposition
Most of the IDEs (integrated development environments) that have been favored by eWEEK Labs have focused on C++ or Java, reflecting the personality of one language throughout their designs. Microsofts own Visual C++, for example, when it came forth as a breakthrough tool for that hybrid language, was all about taming the complexity of its mix of machine-level directness and object-oriented superstructure. Top-flight Java environments such as Borland Software Corp.s JBuilder have instead built on that languages consistent and deep-dyed object orientation to give multiple, synchronized views of work in progress.
Visual Studio 2005 reflects a different approach, one thats driven by a platform rather than a language. It delivers access to Microsofts evolving .Net framework in a way that presents different faces to different developer communities; it reflects the connection of programming language choices to developer skill sets and development tasks.
Spanning those differences is a charter that makes Visual Studio 2005 as much about inducing developers to build the next generation of applications—as Microsoft defines that vision—as it is about preserving developers past investments in skills and code.
Microsoft does pay homage to the investment that developers make in not merely mastering but also fine-tuning a tool. From the moment a developer first fires up the Visual Studio 2005 environment, it invites customization and maintains an accumulating record of a developers preferences and modifications (such as redefining shortcut keys). Rearrangement of tool panes has become a good deal more intuitive, with new visual indicators of docking options that make it much easier to figure out where things can go .
None of this is especially novel, but it becomes more so when combined with export and import commands that make it easy to transfer customizations from one workstation to another. Whatever you might not like about Visual Studio 2005, Microsoft would like to make it easy for you to change it.
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Core capabilities
Some things, though, cant be fixed with mere customization capabilities—and if Microsoft werent so focused on its platform goals, it might put more energy into strengthening Visual Studios fundamentals in areas such as the editing of large text files. A massive data dump, debugging trace or other large file ought to be opened as easily by the editor in Visual Studio as by any other full-strength programmers editor, but we found that this was not the case.
We challenged the Visual Studio 2005 editor with a 400MB text file that we recently had to repair here, following a Windows crash that corrupted an e-mail folder hierarchy. After gnawing at the edges for about 2 minutes, the Visual Studio 2005 editor gave up with a complaint that there was insufficient storage space to complete the task. SlickEdit Inc.s SlickEdit 10.0, the latest release of a long-standing eWEEK Labs Analysts Choice honoree for program editing tools, had that 7-million-line file open and ready for work in less than half a minute on the same (Windows XP, 1GB RAM) machine.
This demonstrates why its unwise for a developer to allow any all-singing, all-dancing integrated tool to become the only one that team members know and use. The limits of ones tools have a nasty way of redefining the problem. To put it another way, multiple tools invite multiple viewpoints, not only on how to do something but also on what should be done.
Code-editing capabilities in Visual Studio 2005 are at least strengthened with long-overdue refactoring facilities. Especially welcome is much-needed renaming in Visual Basic, something weve urged since Version 1.0 of that language appeared in 1991. Finally, its possible to lay out an application quickly and then go back and rename user interface elements and other components more descriptively, without manually tracking down every use of their initial default designations.
Visual Studios continued status as the alpha tool set of PC development also makes it an attractive target for plug-ins and extensions from third parties, whose upgrade announcements flew thick and fast in the week of the Visual Studio 2005 launch. One should note, however, that the Eclipse and NetBeans platforms are also becoming ever-more-popular targets of third-party improvement. Current users of Visual Studio .Net should give these alternate ecosystems an objective look before making an automatic upgrade—although neither Eclipse nor NetBeans could open that massive text file, either.
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Coding in context
One sees the presumed diversity of Visual Studios users in the language-specific packaging of features such as its pop-up “code snippets” facility. This accelerates learning and streamlines the coding of routine operations in a feature thats new to the 2005 update of Visual Studio but is hardly new to the market. The templates facility in JBuilder, for example, offers capability comparable to the snippets offered in Visual Studio 2005 for C# and J# development.
Parenthetically, wed have suggested that Microsoft use a different name: When we hear the word “snippets,” we cant help but think of Microsoft General Counsel William Neukoms 1998 complaint that U.S. Department of Justice lawyers were quoting “snippets” of Microsoft e-mail “dangerously and unreliably out of context.” Sorry, but the word just got stuck in our minds—and the interesting thing about the snippets in Visual Studio 2005 is that their context is so carefully considered.
The snippets offered to the C# and J# developer are language-level shortcuts, while those offered to the Visual Basic developer are packaged in a hierarchy of high-level task categories that lead to descriptively named building blocks of code. We liked the way the Visual Basic coding aids were presented as an introduction to the more sophisticated aspects of the .Net platform.
We feel obligated to note, however, that this platform aid to the Visual Basic developer is part and parcel of a more than slightly controversial (and continuing) mutation of Visual Basic—from the interface builder and animator of versions 6 and earlier into the .Net entry tool that it has become, beginning with the first Visual Basic .Net release in 2002.
Next Page: Basic disagreements.
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Basic disagreements
Developers who think of Visual Basic as a container for their own intellectual property have objected to the idea that the semantics of their chosen language are subject to significant change in the interest of tracking Microsofts platform evolution. Its clear, though, in Visual Studio 2005 that Microsoft hasnt changed its mind about that doctrine—and that the company recognizes the continuing need to assuage the offended Visual Basic 6 community.
Visual Studio 2005s online documentation includes extensive discussion of the transition from Visual Basic 6 to Visual Basic 2005—more than a little odd, considering that Visual Basic 6 was, in theory, left behind three years ago, but Microsoft isnt letting pride get in the way of pragmatically admitting that many Visual Basic 6 developers didnt make the .Net move.
How big are the differences between Visual Basic 6 and Visual Basic 2005? For coders, theres nothing more fundamental than bitwise (Boolean) logic, and Visual Studio 2005 changes the vocabulary of operators that are available for bit-by-bit comparison of data values. The Visual Basic 6 logical implication operator Imp disappears in Visual Basic 2005, with instructions to replace any use of Imp with a logically equivalent expression combining the operators Not and Or. At least this change can be made by a simple substitution based on patterns of text, unlike some of the language changes.
Much less automatic is the question of whether a developer should replace any given use of the Visual Basic 6 And or Or operators, which evaluate all their arguments, with the Visual Basic 2005 alternatives AndAlso or OrElse: The latter variants stop evaluating arguments as soon as the value of a composite expression can be determined, speeding execution but altering behavior when expression evaluations have side effects.
For example, as soon as an AndAlso encounters an argument thats false, it knows that the truth or falsity of other arguments isnt going to change the falsity of the returned result. It can therefore “short-circuit” that evaluation (as this practice is commonly known), but this means that a subsequent argument to the AndElse operator wont always be evaluated. If that argument is an expression that has a side effect, such as altering the value of a variable, then this represents a change in program behavior.
Other issues for the Visual Basic 6 developer range from changes in the values of system-level constants to the disappearance of traditional control-flow statements such as On…GoSub—changes that have led some protesting developers to dub the current language Visual Fred, arguing that its a fine and modern language, but it isnt Basic.
Developers in any language should consider the similar question: “Is Visual Studio 2005 the tool that I want?” Microsoft offers developers a comprehensive, impressively choreographed environment for building a broad variety of applications that include both rich clients and Web services. Its up to developers to look in the shadows as well as admire whats deservedly in the spotlight of this high-profile debut.
Next page: Evaluation Shortlist: Related Products.
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Evaluation Shortlist
Borlands JBuilder 2005 A portfolio of versions aimed at many combinations of capability and price (www.borland.com/us/products/jbuilder)
Eclipse 3.1 An ecosystem of plug-ins thats becoming the foundation of many commercial developer offerings (www.eclipse.org)
Oracles JDeveloper 10g 10.1.3 Lets developers tailor technology portfolios and deployment platforms to their needs; approachable but second to none in capability and responsiveness (www.oracle.com/technology/products/jdev)
Sun Microsystems Inc.s Java Studio Enterprise Combines NetBeans 4.1 shell with UML (Unified Modeling Language) facilities and collaboration tools (developers.sun.com/prodtech/devtools)
Technology Editor Peter Coffee can be reached at peter_coffee@ziffdavis.com.
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