A few weeks ago, I updated my blog by writing about Microsoft’s commitment to VB.Net. This posting generated a healthy discussion between C# & VB developers with both camps championing their favorite features. A nice feature for our VB customers in Visual Studio 2005 (and also Visual C++) is ‘Edit & Continue’ (E&C). For those of you not familiar with E&C, E&C enables you to make changes to your code while an application is being debugged. Imagine that you are debugging a complex application. Suddenly, you see that you’ve made an error in your application. Sighing, you stop the application, make the correction and start the code-compile-debug cycle all over again. This means that you spend a lot of time recompiling the application even if you’ve changed only one line of code. E&C changes this and reduces the time required to fix bugs. In the above scenario, you could just fix the SQL query and continue debugging the application from the same point.
One of the top feedback requests from our customers is support for Edit & Continue (E&C) in C# in Visual Studio 2005. I am excited to announce that the C# team took your feedback to heart and has added support for E&C in Visual Studio 2005.
We have always maintained that you should program in the language you’re most comfortable with. If you like E&C but prefer programming in C#, Visual Studio 2005 will enable you to do just that. This is a great example of the large number of customer driven features in Visual Studio 2005. Adding E&C to Visual C# is currently one of the top requested customer suggestions on the MSDN Product Feedback Center. Visual C# 2005 in Whidbey has been significantly improved by adding innovative language constructs, new compiler features, dramatically enhanced developer productivity, and an improved debugging experience.
We will be putting out the next Community Technology Preview for Visual Studio 2005 next week. This will contain the C# E&C feature. Give it a whirl and let us know how you like this!
Check out this page to see the latest information on Visual Studio 2005 and for a link to the latest Community Technology Preview when we make this available next week.
Namaste!