In a comment , Robert Watkins proposes a preview mode for refactorings. Funny how things work out. The original implementation of Whidbey Refactorings included an optional preview window that was 100% annoying. Every time it came up, I would kick myself...

Chris Garty asks what tools are availble to help Test-First development. He says: “ it would be great if my development tool could automatically create empty implementations of the classes and methods I am testing though simple 'right-click to...

The C# refactorings we're building in Whidbey are designed to be reliable. Not all of our customers use TDD, but many will use the refactoring tools we build. If the tools don't work reliably, users will stop using them. The big exception was unbuildable...

Shaykat posts on $exception. It's a little debugger trick to let you see the inners of the current exception when one fires. Funny thing about the name. Often folks use 'ex' to name an instance of an exception type. So, we figured we'd call it '$ex...

Hey, we're hiring. My team is trying to hire some one right now to work on the C# editor. Read the job description & apply if you're interested.

Mark Cliggett's blog seems a good source of information on our Community efforts. One of the interesting aspects of these changes is that it's not uniform. You're dealing with many different people, so each one's personality is going to shine through...

Have you heard? Microsoft has decided to start publicly dropping Visual Studio Whidbey builds on a regular basis. That means we'll regularly just grab a build of the product and publish it. Cool, huh? I think this is totally awesome. (Dude!) This...

This post is 100% whine. It's where I get to complain about how parts of the .Net Framework are put together. I don't intend to be constructive. Statics Why are System.IO.File & System.IO.Directory static classes? They should be instance classes...

In a previous post , I talked about some ideas about how to write Object Oriented code. Today I'd like to delve a little deeper. One of my favorite Refactoring s is Replace Data Value with Object . You start with a weak type and move to a stronger...

In a previous blog , I said “ This new code is about classes (FilePath) instead of being about functions (IsUncPath(string) ). ” Pearls of wisdom, for sure. But what does it mean? How do you know if you're really writing OO code?...

If you're thinking about doing Test-Driven Development, you may ask yourself how long it should take for your unit tests to run. Faster is always better. The time it takes to run tests has various effects. When the unit test suite slows down: ...