Microsoft touts 10 changes to Visual Studio

On the road to delivering a final version of Visual Studio 2005, Microsoft has instituted some changes to the upcoming toolbox.

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Visual Studio 2005, code-named “Whidbey,” is due to ship in the second half of 2005, and the latest round of alterations that developers should expect pertain primarily to Visual C#, Web Forms, and icons.

The user-driven, top-10 improvement list begins with the ability to deploy updated and new icon sets. This feature enables access to icons that can be distributed with applications. This makes it easier for developers to focus on code, said Brian Keller, a Microsoft product manager on the Visual Studio team.

Adding Edit and Continue support for Visual C#, meanwhile, means developers can change code during debugging without having to run a full compile, Keller said.

Edit and Continue is “extremely useful,” said Mike Gilpin, vice president and research director at Forrester Research. “It allows you to maintain your train of thought when you’re finding errors and correcting them rather than interrupt your debugging session,” Gilpin said.

The third improvement comes in a Component Tray feature for working with nongraphical components such as performance counters. Microsoft addressed the lack of a Component Tray by adding a Component Designer tab to Visual Studio 2005.

The fourth improvement boosts the tray icon support. Developers want a managed interface for adding balloon-type messages to icons in the system tray, Keller said. This is implemented as an API.

Additionally, developers will be able to download Visual Studio 2005 Express Edition and install it offline, as opposed to having to install it while connected to the Internet.

Users also will get ASP.Net Web Forms templates that do not use obsolete HTML.

Yet another fix applies to building console-based applications that use a command-line interface. “When you build a command-line application and compile and run that application from Visual Studio, sometimes the output window closes too quickly to see the results of your program” during debug mode, Keller said. “Now when you run a command-line app from within Visual Studio, the user will receive a ‘Press any key to continue’ prompt.”

Microsoft is also fixing Visual Studio 2005’s Intellisense function, which tracks letters being typed and provides available commands for a particular class based on keystrokes. That function will no longer select a method too quickly.

The software giant also amended client-side validation to work with browsers other than just Microsoft’s IE. Lastly, an ASP.Net run-time issue has been mended. The ASP.Net “Menu” control had only behaved properly in IE. This, too, has been fixed so it will work with other browsers such as Firefox and Mozilla.