Using VS2005 Beta 1 (Part 2) - The Beta Strikes Back
I thought i'd do a bit of an update with my experience of VS2005 (hmm..do i call it VS2k5?).
In my first post on this, I was on the bug hunt and checking the new immediately visible things.
Since then, i've had a little more of a play - I still haven't checked out the new language features, and I still haven't played with the Class Designer. I'll get there - these two things are probably the two most important bits for in the whole lot actually.
My first stop was to check out the new MenuStrip, ToolStrip, and StatusStrip. The toolbar has had exetremely poor support in VS for a very long time - the only way to get it done well is to revert to the Win32 API functions, and create the controls yourself using calls like CreateWindow() or CreateToolbar(). So the first thing i do is checkout the Toolstrip.
There some nice things in there. I like the smart-tag-like way it pops up specific property windows in the designer, although they are a little limited in the options they provide. Hopefully they get finished off too - double clicking on a toolbartextboxitem that i added shouldn't have dropped me into the code for the textchanged() event (in my opinion). Nope, no code generated. But that's ok, i'm sure they'll get there.
But i can't really review them that well yet. I'm running VS2005 on a virtual pc. The host is a 1.8gig celeron with 512 meg of ram, so the VPC is a 1.8gig celeron with 256meg. the desinger is so freaking slow it not funny, so it'll have to wait for the final build i guess.
I've had a quick look at the new WebBrowser control too. It's about damn time they wrote a managed wrapper for this!!! I've had to do a lot of nonstandard work with the web browser control, and the autogenerated interop sometimes comes up wrong, and hooking document events was buggy as hell (never fear, i'm probably one of the leading experts of programming with the web browser control now - pick your poison, VB.net or VB6 :) I guess the VB.net knowledge flows through to C# too, i'm sure the concepts are the same, but i haven't exploited it yet.
It looks to be alright, although i didn't go all the deep down into the bowels of it to make sure i could still play with the DHTML event model from .net code on the rendered document - but a very nice feature is the method to invoke the javascript on the page being hosted. Nice!
That's about all i've done so far. Between crippling slowness and many crashes, I haven't been able to be too productive with it quite yet. But that's ok, i'ma wiz at using the Product Feedback Center now *grin*
Listening to: no excuses - alice in chains - (4:15)