- 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.