How I Got Here


I've been working with Microsoft "visual" tools since the first version of Visual Basic was released in 1991, over 14 years ago. Since then, Visual Basic was joined by other visual language development toolseach with its own unique characteristics and following. In our opinion, the folks at Microsoft decided it was expensive to keep developing and marketing language-specific IDEs and decided (somewhat unwisely, IMHO) to create "Visual Studio" to act as a bundled launching pad for Visual Basic and the other visual languages. At first, each language had its own language-specific developer interface, but when Visual Studio .NET 1.0 appeared in 2000, these were morphed together (more or less) into a common IDE, despite substantive differences in the development paradigms. As I see it, compromises were made at every turn to implement this approach. Since then, Visual Studio has further "evolved" and genericized so developers could tune and configure the IDE to match their specific needs and (more importantly) the familiar keyboard and window layouts to which they had grown accustomed over the years. The Visual Studio 2005 version is far more tolerant of other configurationsit supports configurable profiles to alter the keyboard shortcuts and IDE layouts. While Visual Studio 2005 has made a number of somewhat rude assumptions about Visual Basic developers, Visual Studio 2005 can be easily reconfiguredassuming you know what to ask for. I'll show you how to configure these settings in this chapter. Sadly, if you choose the "Visual Basic" profile, Microsoft assumes that you are a "hobbyist," so it hides a number of important featureslike your mommy putting away the sharp scissors and chainsaw, in case you might be tempted to saw up your sister. I'll tell you how to re-enable these features in this chapterbut please don't dismember anyone in your (or my) family.

At one point in time, I thought Microsoft had started to re-evaluate the wisdom of this OSFA[2] approach to the application-development tools. It does not take a rocket scientist to realize that a Web Service and an ASP.NET application have very little in common. If you add to that Windows Forms (what they now call "Smart Client") applications, you easily see that a common IDE doesn't really make a lot of senseexcept that it's easier to package and sell. Given that new web-centric tools have been created to compete with Visual Studio, you can understand Microsoft's motivation to break the studio apart. I doubt if this will happen anytime soonespecially given the fact that they have recently combined the ASP and Windows Forms teams into one group. The "Orcas" version (due to be released near the Vista timeframe) is pretty much designed and well along the way toward a late 2006 or early 2007 launch. Perhaps the following release ("Hawaii") will incorporate this "separate but equal" approachbut I doubt it.

[2] OSFA: One size fits all.




Hitchhiker's Guide to Visual Studio and SQL Server(c) Best Practice Architectures and Examples
Hitchhikers Guide to Visual Studio and SQL Server: Best Practice Architectures and Examples, 7th Edition (Microsoft Windows Server System Series)
ISBN: 0321243625
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2006
Pages: 227

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