Some beta 2 feature changes

re: Some beta 2 feature changes

Daniel Moth — Fri, 29 Oct 2004 23:08:00 GMT

Am I reading this OK? There will be no new refactorings offered other than "rename symbol" in VS2005 for VB?? That will be bad news.

re: Some beta 2 feature changes

Austin Ehlers — Sat, 30 Oct 2004 00:33:00 GMT

What about default instances?

re: Some beta 2 feature changes

Amanda Silver — Sat, 30 Oct 2004 00:45:00 GMT

I'm working on a response to that request...

VB Features in whidbey beta 2

Di .NET e di altre amenita' — Sat, 30 Oct 2004 15:41:00 GMT

Not much refactoring for VB

.Avery Blog — Sun, 31 Oct 2004 01:46:00 GMT

re: Some beta 2 feature changes

Steven Lees — Sat, 30 Oct 2004 23:04:00 GMT

Re: Daniel's comment, yes that's correct. We'll have rename symbol, but there won't be other refactorings in the product. There are already at least a couple of addins that add refactoring to VB 2003, and we're talking to a couple of companies that are working on addins for VB 2005, so the capability will be available. And of course, we'll definitely be adding more refactorings to the next version.

re: Some beta 2 feature changes

Steven Lees — Sat, 30 Oct 2004 23:06:00 GMT

Just to be clear, by "next version" I meant the one after Whidbey.

re: Some beta 2 feature changes

Daniel Moth — Sun, 31 Oct 2004 16:41:00 GMT

Thanks for confirming my fears. The 3rd party approach doesn't fly with me. If it did, I would not be excited about unit testing in TeamSystem or the Class Designer and other VS2005 technologies; a lot of the new functionality is already on offer by 3rd parties but in the end we all prefer to receive it from MSFT (for what I hope are obvious reasons so I will not go through them here). Personally, I use both environments and it is disappointing that the more the languages diverge, the more I have to retrain myself when I switch between them. The C# team managed to satisfy their customer's number 1 request (EnC) so I guess I was hoping that the VB team would follow suit. Looking forward to reading your comment about the 2nd most asked VB feature: removal of default Form instances.

re: Some beta 2 feature changes

Alex Kazovic — Sun, 31 Oct 2004 19:17:00 GMT

I presume that the refactoring is in the IDE rather than a part of the laguage. If that is the case, could you release a new version of VS, say six months after the RTM of VS 2005 that had full refactoring etc.?

re: Some beta 2 feature changes

Steven Lees — Tue, 02 Nov 2004 02:49:00 GMT

You're comparing apples and oranges a little bit. Regardless of where the implementation lives (IDE vs language), we definitely expect to include this in the next release after VS 2005, whenever that is. But we tend to go longer than 6 months between releases.

re: Some beta 2 feature changes

Alex kazovic — Tue, 02 Nov 2004 04:52:00 GMT

I think it’s important to distinguish between .Net itself (in this case .Net 2.0) and the IDE (VS 2005). I think it would cause problems if .Net was updated as regularly as every six months, but that would not be the case with the IDE. You don’t have to have a new version of .Net to update the IDE.

re: Some beta 2 feature changes

Fan — Tue, 02 Nov 2004 05:18:00 GMT

VB won't get more Refactoring and a more convenient intelisence as C#, but in the same time C# can get a very complex feature EnC. Why? There must be another important and exciting feature in VB we have ignored while we are looking for something like Refactoring. Who can confirm it for me? :)

Refactoring: Not for VB 2005 (for the most part)

Panopticon Central — Tue, 02 Nov 2004 20:30:00 GMT

re: Some beta 2 feature changes

PS — Tue, 02 Nov 2004 18:25:00 GMT

BOOOO, BOOOOO.... We don't depend on third parties for features we want built into VS from MS. That is such a bad excuse. Next your going to tell us that MS is dropping VS because a third party made something just like it.

Should have skipped the ClickOnce from VB Express and spent more time on refactoring.

I too find it interesting that C# developers are getting what they want, but we are getting less than desired features that we want. Does that mean that we are going to turn into C# want-to-bes? :)

I guess there is always the "Power Toys" option after the VS 2005 release.

Refactoring for VB.NET 2005 Going Away

Bruce Johnson's SOA(P) Box — Tue, 02 Nov 2004 21:37:00 GMT

Refactoring for VB.NET 2005 Going Away?

Bruce Johnson's SOA(P) Box — Tue, 02 Nov 2004 21:38:00 GMT

Insanity

Phil Wells — Tue, 02 Nov 2004 18:39:00 GMT

MS needs to get with the program. Refactoring tools have been around in Java since *2001*. If it's another 2 years before the next VB.NET release, this will put the VB IDE *6 years* behind best practice in this area. Given this, how you can ever expect VB to be taken seriously as a programming language beats me.

MS should also do some reading on the development technique called 'Continuous integration'. It should not be necessary for VS users to wait years between releases. Set up a continuous integration system and let's get nightly builds of the IDE. If the Eclipse and IntelliJ Idea teams can do it, why can't you? You can't expect your users to patiently wait 2 more years for proper refactoring support in VB. Serious developers will defect to C# leaving only the hobbyists programming VB. But perhaps that's been your aim all along?

re: Some beta 2 feature changes

Phil Wells — Tue, 02 Nov 2004 18:44:00 GMT

PS - Frankly I wish MS would drop VS and let a company such as JetBrains develop it. To see why, I encourage you to spend an hour with their 'Idea' IDE if you haven't already. Even if you don't know Java you'll immediately notice a multitude of small but incredibly useful features that that IDE offers that makes it any programmer's wet dream. In comparison, VS.NET is stodgy and awkward.

re: Some beta 2 feature changes

RichB — Wed, 03 Nov 2004 07:20:00 GMT

Phil Wells wrote:
> Serious developers will defect to C# leaving
> only the hobbyists programming VB. But
> perhaps that's been your aim all along?

That is Microsoft's stated aim:

"When asked who Microsoft sees as the developer audience for VB, the answers were enlightening. Treadwell characterized developers as coming from two camps, those who would approach the problem of writing a tic-tac-toe game by drawing the UI first (VB developers) and those who would first create the classes and code required for the game logic ("computer science" developers). The interviewees said that Microsoft would make further alterations to VB to help target that entry-level audience."

So, yes - VB is entry-level, aka hobbyist. That's why I'm now a C# developer rather than a VB developer.

I actually believe that VB.Net should be more entry-level than it currently is. I believe VB coders should be able to write smaller programs much much faster than C# developers can write them. However, that will inevitably constrain the VB language from doing everything that C# can do and thus prevent it from being used to build larger systems.

You can see this in the V1 product with the background compile in VB.Net - current large VB.Net products have to stop using the IDE because background compile causes the whole system to slow down to such a point that no development can be done. However, this feature enables smaller programs to be written faster.

Phil Wells also wrote:
> Frankly I wish MS would drop VS and let a
> company such as JetBrains develop it

Have you seen JetBrains Resharper?
http://www.jetbrains.com/resharper/

re: Some beta 2 feature changes

Alex Kazovic — Wed, 03 Nov 2004 12:20:00 GMT

I don’t agree with RichB’s comments on VB should be for hobbyists etc. The comment on using VB to build smaller programs is interesting, because, as I see it, as we move towards SOA “programs” will be smaller. Rather that having one large object model in a business application we will tend to have more smaller object models.

re: Some beta 2 feature changes

Anthony D. Green — Sat, 06 Nov 2004 20:50:00 GMT

The Basic line has never and will never be a purely hobbyist family. And degrading VB to some light computer info. tech class language would defeat the purpose of all this CLI stuff we're pushing.

I'm still lost on why IDE features can be so language specific. I'm still lost on where C# found the magic cycles to get EnC. I'm still lost on why anyone would want those default instances back.

Back to my disagreeing. Now that C# has "our" Edit&Continue and "our" Forms Editor (If they get a background compiler I'm gonna quit programmer), I don't think it's fair to say that people who start with the UI are VB Developers. Furthermore I, a VB Developer, have written whole class systems and code for game logic of a Chess game and plenty of other programs before thinking about the UI, in VB.

To me it is, and has always been, even when I was a VB6 developer choosing not to program in C++ (and I could have) an astetic issue. VB and C* are on opposite sides of a spectrum, and to me all those ripoff, C-wanna be, semicolon-terminating, braces-using, case-sensitivity-worshipping clones (Java this means you) are just displeasant to work in. It's not because I'm stupider. My eyes just have things they like to look at for long periods of time at late hours of the night. Take a journalism class or photography, the human eye has all sorts of neat preferences.

Take a look at the System.Reflection.Assembly Class overview example on MSDN. Code littered with ambiguous symbols bothers me. I enjoy english, End If, and all those other "wordy" things, I think they make my code clearer and cleaner in the same way that I enjoy indenting and using #Regions. I don't see logical differences between my name, Anthony, written in the 128 possible variations of it by case. I also look at a logical line of code as a physical line of code and would sooner pick a period for a line terminator than the semicolon.

Does this mean I can't use C#, no, I have. Does this mean I'm a "stupid n00b programmer", no, I'm not. Does this means I should be penalized for my visual preference, or worse yet my 7 years experience and comfort in BASIC languages and have to jump around between the 8,000 new "someone thought me up in their basement" languages (Yeah, I admit it, PHP and Python bother me) learning their libraries to do increasingly integrated task? No.

I'm in .NET for reasons: Power & Flexibility. Multithreading, delegates, Object-Orientation, Web Apps, all wonderful. I would prefer Microsoft to not backtrack into pre.NET days of extreme language disparity, is that so wrong?

re: Some beta 2 feature changes

Louis van Geldrop — Mon, 08 Nov 2004 17:01:00 GMT

Hopefully one of the old VB6 features may be back in the beta2: overlapping transparent usercontrols.

re: Some beta 2 feature changes

Acerty31 — Wed, 10 Nov 2004 06:39:00 GMT

No more refactoring in VB.NET is a great strategic error. You should think about it, unless your objective is to make VB.NET a second class environment far behind VC#.NET ...

re: Some beta 2 feature changes

VYP — Mon, 15 Nov 2004 12:18:00 GMT

Why didn't MS add real VB and C# parser class to .net yet? This will at least allow such features like refactoring to be a part of IDE, not of language. As far as I know code improvement plug-ins (like IntelliJ ReSharper) are made language specific because their authors don't want to write two parsers instead of one. If it was a real parser class for both VB and C# integrated to framework, I think, plug-in authors would be very happy...

re: Some beta 2 feature changes

Richy_roo — Sat, 20 Nov 2004 08:19:00 GMT

The refactoring features increases productivity and VB.NET is meant to be a 'productive tool'. I really think there's been a mistake here.

Code Snippets! useful for the 'hobbyiest' a term which occurs frequently, but isnt that kinda anti-refactoring - taking prebuilt code, which should really be method calls and copy/pasting them x times through your application.. 'anti-refactoring'.

Give us refactoring, let the developer decide on code snippets or refactoring.

After the hype there still the message spreading that c# is the 'main language' and now the news that c++ is the future and should be considered in 2005. lets fly the VB flag and get the OO stuff in there..

C'mon the c# team got edit and contine...

please, please, please give us refactoring...

re: Some beta 2 feature changes

Frank — Mon, 22 Nov 2004 06:42:00 GMT

I don't want anybody here leave VB because of the lack of refactoring! We have used VB for 10 years without refactoring and we can wait another year.

re: Some beta 2 feature changes

Andy — Mon, 22 Nov 2004 10:47:00 GMT

You must question the sanity of introducing the "My" class and "code snippet" changes as opposed to refactoring. This just reinforces the point that VB will be the hobby language instead of the professional language it should be. A crying shame.

The VB team needs to be keeping up with the C# team and doing more in order to correct the detrimental feeling about VB in the industry, but sadly, it appears professional features are excluded for changes that bring next to nothing to the party. IMHO it appears a decision was made to tailor VB as a classroom/learner language, and this underlying trend is what is worrying, not just that refactoring was excluded.

re: Some beta 2 feature changes

Simon Geering — Wed, 24 Nov 2004 15:42:00 GMT

Why can't the refactoring features be released as an add-in ASAP after the release of VS 2005? MS needs to make a serious effort to promote VB as the enterprise development language that we all know it is. Surely the resources that would be needed for this a comparatively small to the sort of funds Microsoft invests in other areas, can they not see the value for money they would get in developing a refactoring add-in?

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