Edit and Continue vs. Mort
All this talk about E&C, I thought it'd be a good idea to talk about the personas.
Ian has a good description of the personas we use when talking about Visual Studio users. There's a language correlation, too. VB primarily targets Mort, C# targets Elvis, and C++ targets Einstein.
Mort
Consider what happens when Mort decides to solve a problem with some software. He probably doesn't know what the solution will look like. He will likely try to find some existing code that does something similar and cut-and-paste it into his code. He won't waste time trying to understand how this chunk of code works, he's got a problem to solve. He'll run the code & try it out in a couple ways. If it works, he's done.
If it doesn't work, he'll run under the debugger. He'll try experimenting with various changes to the code until it seems to work. (In VB6, he would do much of this experimentation in the immediate window, and then paste the result into his code.) E&C is the foundation of this approach to development.
