Feature Requests for Visual Studio 2005

I want everyone to list their TOP 5 feature requests for Visual Studio 2005.

I am confident that these requests will be viewed by a large range of people.  Don't go unheard, and list your 5, no matter how absurd!

I will try collate them and sort the requests using a ranking system from 1 - X so feel free to repeat other peoples requests, as they will get a higher ranking.

1. interface morphs into frontpage/webmatix hybrid under design mode for web * i want battle between VS and Dreamweaver NOT DM/FP

2. non-programmer drag and drop wizards for common asp forum / portal needs (Word present? grab spell checker for post windows etc)

3. webdev/designer friendly winmedia tuner creation - with templates - and working samples

4. webdev designer friendly application creation wizards = no programming at ALL

5.  you pull off 4 and... bow... we are not worthy

1. Hyper Links between Visio Shapes and VS Codes

2. Dotfuscator Pro

3. A Document-View Structure for .NET

4. Smart Documentation Tools

5. ASP.NET for Apache

1. Use the same debug engine as WinDbg. Enabling all nice debug extensions and commands from WinDbg in VS. I almost quit using VS for any debugging because WinDbg is much superior in many ways.
2. Integration with UML like Rational XDR. Let’s face it Visio UML suck! Provide wizards based on the GoF (and other) patterns (like XDR does).
3. Ability to use multiple compilers (at least MS compilers) and CRT/MFC/ATL from the same IDE would be a good feature. For instance why do not let me in VS2005 build my project using VC compiler 7.1 (13.x) using CRT/MFC/ATL from VC6.0. We are doing this right now with our home build environment and it works for us.
4. Integration of editor with some sort of spelling checker.
5. 100% standard conformance for C++. Would you guys finally implement export keyword? And quit saying that it is useless. Papers that were saying that are obsolete and there where some new studies on that keyword (by EDG) that proved that it are not that useless as many thought.

 

I am omitting here all the features that I am missing, but I’ve heard will be in VS2005:

- A solid source control.

- Bug tracking system.

- More flexible build environment.

- VC project browsing like call graph etc

- Support for more formatting styles in the VC editor. (Holly question of curly braces J)

Great requests so far!
Keep them rolling in guys!

Autocrat wrote:

Great requests so far!
Keep them rolling in guys!

..or maybe we should just stop and do all the above ones...

thats all folks
nothing to see here
move along now

- A new database project type that can provide compile-time protection of stored procedure invocations in code against stored procedures listed in the project.

- Let user defined task tokens in code files (ie, TODO, HACK, etc) show up in the tasklist for all files in a solution/project, not just files that are open in an editor.

- This one is science fiction, but maybe it could happen - Allow developers to take a snapshot of an application being debugged, so we can literally restore to that point at a moments notice and walkthrough it again.  It probably couldn't work if the data definition of a class changed, but if I'm just changing the way I've implemented a function that processes data, I should be able to roll back in time to a point I was at before and debug through the same section of code (slightly modified) with the exact same values and virtualized external resources like file pointers, etc, I had before.  I can build test environments now that let me do this, but it would be a huge timesaver, particularly when doing the final "playing" with UI elements.

- For the love of God, please put version control integration back into the Visual Studio Express versions.  Version control isn't a best practice - its a required practice, and anything that encourages college students and entry-level enthusiasts to run down the wrong path just makes it 10x harder for me to get them back on track when we hire a junior developer.  Hell, take it a step further - Require version control in the express builds.

- On the topic of version control, Eclipse has a nice feature in the local version repository.  2005 will mark changes since the last save in the margin, but a number of us are save junkies who hit Ctrl-S after every line or so.  Take snapshots of changed files every 5 minutes so developers can have local histories of their work.  This is almost critical when considering the new refactoring tools in VS - every TDD developer I know has been stung by what they mistakingly thought was a trivial minor refactoring that was anything but.  Sure, the undo buffer helps some, but I can't set the two files side by side and compare them, and the undo buffer doesn't run all the way back to my last checkin.  That has value to me.

1. Mousegestures,
2. DotFuscator Pro,
3. Speech recognition for coding (not only for menu commands!),
4. Decent Windows Installer project creations
5. and patches.

1. Column selection in the editor.

2. NANT build files - hand in hand here, allow for all build errors that can be generated to be generated and acted upon

3. Search and replace accross files NOT require all files to remain open.

4. Stop the random just going away bugs while compiling large projects (over 1k files in a solution)

5. Spell checker (only one other people have so I put it down)

lorad wrote:

1. Column selection in the editor.

Maybe, "Alt + Selection" is what you want for 1.!

No matter how absurd? Ok.

1. I want VS2005 without having to pay thousands of dollars, or wait till it has been around for a year then it's half its original price. That is not on.

2. I want interoperatibility, meaning I want a small 'code converter' that can change my C# code into J# code or something like that.

3. I want a choice of a small version of the VS2005, or a big version. Rather than having when I install it whether or not I should remove features to get more space it should be a clipped down version of specific features. And the big version to have all the features at their full.

4. I want it customizable, but only by making code. Where if the user wants to change the skin, what ever is in the menus etc. they have to go in to a special file and re-code it. This helps in people remembering functions and teaching new programmers new code.

5. I want a 'spellchecker' where if the user has spelled a word or function wrong the spell checker will show in the bottom bar as being a cross (just like in Word).


That's my five. I wonder if any of these are already in the VS2005 beta.

cool... well - in order:

1. non-null pointer types
My current best solution is to define a template called _ which is a struct, and won't accept a null, so you can say _<string> Blah( _<Employee> k) - but it's still dodgy, and you have to say k.Call. to call any functions/properties on it.  PLEASE give us non-null types!  PLEASE

2. Constructor inheritance
This is just stupid.  It would break zero existing code - it's logically what should have always happened, it allows a better analogue of C++'s typedef functions, it cuts down on heaps of duplication - and it always should have been the way it worked.   All base constructors should be inherited IF and ONLY IF no constructors are declared in the current class

3. "extends" keyword
Constantly we want to add tool functions to existing classes.  This is just syntactic sugar, but it is very important.  If I want to add a Contains function to string - at the moment, I have to either inherit from string and have everything that uses /produces a string suddenly use my string class (impossible) - or create a separate function somewhere in some stringhelper class, which takes a string.  Is should be able to say
   class StringHelper : extends String
and "add" functions to string, so I can just say myString.Contains("blah") - NOTE - these functions would have _NO_ more access to the underlying class than any other function - it's just a syntactic replaceemnt for StringHelper.Contains( mString, "blah")

4. "expose" keyword
Anyone who's believes in layers has found themselves making heaps of wrapper classes - that just hide the internal details of the class they are wrapping.  And 99% of those classes will just be empty functions that pass control to the class you are wrapping.  ie
    public string Text {get{return _wrappedItem.Text;} set {_wrappedItem.Text = value;} etc etc
Now, these are a pain to write, but also to maintain - because if we change  the underlying class, we have to change the wrapper class.  It would be much better if we could just write
    expose _wrappedItem.Text, _WrappedItem.ForeColor, _wrappedItem.BackColor;

5.code replacement macros
a'la coderush - the templates feature in coderush is the next big productivity improvement from intellisense - being able to say "when I type this" - actually produce this code is a MASSIVE improvement in productivity.