UK Consultant Simon Thorneycroft shares his experiences starting out with Visual Studio 2005

I remember the very first thing I wrote using the new beta of Visual Studio 2005. Despite the comfort of my old development environment, the drive to get to grips with .NET Framework 2.0 and I’ll admit the lure of new toys drove me to the decision to develop a few real world projects in Visual Studio 2005. I was also apprehensive about this course of action because the tools and extensions that I had come to rely on in my old heavily customised Visual Studio.NET 2003 install would be gone.

I am a .NET software consultant and keen blogger with ten years experience in the IT sector working for blue chip companies. Like anyone who really cares about IT, it is crucial for me to remain ahead of the curve. Currently, I spend my time developing software for financial institutions in London and that means many hours using my development environment; I have come to place great value in the productivity of an IDE and how it adapts to my working style.

With the expectation that it was going to be a long haul to get this IDE behaving the way I needed it to, I fired it up. From the off though, Visual Studio 2005 helped me to be almost as productive as I was before and the more time spent cranking out code, the more effective I became. Creating my project was easier, I was a little shocked at first because the IDE had organised the dialog so that the C# project types were right at the top of the list, then I vaguely remembered that the installer had asked me what my favourite language was.

The coding experience was better too, I needed to derive from an abstract type from one of our libraries, a smart tag popped up and a couple of clicks later I had the stubs. I then generated an interactive class diagram and made some changes inside the diagram to improve the code a little, refactor away those code smells! Things were improving, but I had boiler plate code to get through. The new support for snippets really helped there and I can’t wait until Visual Studio gets an editor for these code fragment generators; it wasn’t long before I had the classes and their properties complete.

Since test driven development is integral to my approach to writing software, I have my IDE set up to run an external custom tool. This time I could use the comprehensive testing functionality built right into Visual Studio. I got the IDE to generate test method stubs and once I had an adequate set of tests for my first piece of functionality, I ran them from the test view.

As expected all the tests failed, but I also noticed that the code was still a little messy and did not clearly state its purpose, fortunately, Visual Studio provides a bundle of useful refactorings. I was able to extract methods, reorder parameters and extract methods to interfaces; all in the knowledge that these changes would be rippled through the rest of the library code.

Everything was working by this point, with the exception of one presentation layer test. I found the problem was some XSLT I had written, Visual Studio let me debug the transformation and visualise what was going on at each step. That was it, I showed the class diagram of the library to a colleague who would be using it and we discussed over a couple of coffees. Visual Studio 2005 has been a very positive experience for me and with the go live license for .NET framework 2.0 I am now developing my new products on this platform.