Jerry Nixon @Work: Visual Studio 2005 (Wouldn't It Be Great If...)

Jerry Nixon on Windows

Thursday, February 2, 2006

Visual Studio 2005 (Wouldn't It Be Great If...)

Wouldn’t it be great if when you were in Visual Studio 2005:

(Note: many comments based on the Release Candidate version)

1. When you hovered your mouse over the #endregion tag a tooltip would appear that told you the name of the #region so you don’t have to scroll up to it.

2. When you right-clicked an #endregion tag and selected “Go To Definition” it jumped you to the #region tag.

3. There was a keystroke that allowed the effective equivalent of CTRL-F5 of the current project you were in – regardless of the Solution build settings.

4. If the Team System/Foundation Server “Merge Changes Form Me” feature actually worked without causing the SLN file to report “Some Solution properties could not be read.”

5. If the Team System/Foundation Server check in feature brought back the “Leave Checked out” feature that old Visual Source Safe had.

6. The double-tab that invokes snippets could also invoke Surrounds With so the context menu/mouse was not such a necessary thing.    

7. If the Team System/Foundation Server check out feature told you there was a newer version on the server (which it does in the never-checked output pane) and then prompted you to go get it so you are editing the latest version.    

7. C# doesn’t do a great job of syntax checking until you actually try to build. What if you could right click a single file and validate it’s syntax without trying to build the whole project. That would be sweet – or it could just to the realtime checking like Visual Basic does so well.

{ I will be updating this list regularly }