VS 2005 CTP March 2004

I’ve been working with the CTP to put together an article for ASPToday. Along the way I’ve kept some notes. Since the version I’ve been working with is now obsolete, I thought I should post these notes before they become too obsolete also.

• The intellisense features are just too good. My cat even loves intellisense. Her name is Beaker. She occasionally lumbers across the keyboard producing random characters and compiler errors, but with the May build I wouldn’t be surprised if she paws out the source to a CLI compliant “Hello World” program. Thanks to Cyrus and the rest of his team for making this work so well.
• One request – I didn’t have intellisense or the ability to ‘format document’ in a web.sitemap file. I imagine this is only a matter of time.
• One more request to consider: when I auto-complete on a method override, the default is to give me a stub method like so:

             {
                  throw new NotImplementedException();
              }

Would it be possible to give me a stub method that forwards the call to the base class with the parameters? This would seem like a more useful stub to build on.

• Last comment about the editor (honest!). I find the bold class names a bit distracting, as well as the squares that appear around matching delimiters. I lose track of the insertion point when the magic squares appear and start hitting the arrow buttons until they go away.
• There used to be a “Set As Start Page” option in the context menu for a web form in the solution explorer window, but there is not in the CTP. Hopefully this is just a temporary omission as it’s a nice way to avoid an extra navigation step when starting the debugger.
• Please don’t change the shortcut keys. It took me months to stop pressing F7 after moving from 6.0 to NET.
• The data visualizations are coming along very well.

I’m wondering how well the CTPs are working for Microsoft. Are they getting the early and useful feedback they were hoping for? Most of the comments on JRoxe’s request for feedback post seem to be of the “yes I’m using it” type.

Now ... on to the May 2004 CTP.