Eric J. Smith's Weblog

You are not the only one, just need to know how we can ask? :)

Loosely Coupled

E&C is not required when using a good debugging style, it supports a bad debugging style (i.e. poking around in code to fix 'bugs' in a trial/error way).

I didn't think edit & continue was possible for c# anyway?

I would personally love to see E&C in C#. Coming from a C++ background, E&C is the only thing that's missing. With regards to E&C supporting bad debugging style: I don't get it! What's bad style about debugging a bit of code, realising you want to multiply a*c rather than a*b, changing it, and continuing? Is it bad style for making this this simple mistake? I don't think E&C makes for sloppy coding (if you're sloppy, then E&C isn't going to make you either less or more sloppy).

I suspect theres a technical issue that may muddle the 'beauty' of C# code compiling and execution. Ie: There's an extra interpreter engine in VB that enables E&C.

"E&C is not required when using a good debugging style, it supports a bad debugging style" - What a load of bull! Anyone that believes this has never used it regularly. Try debugging an ASP.Net application that requires logins, and numerous clicks to drill down to where you need to be in the debug session (all with long delays due to DB round-trips) only to find you forgot to remove a ToUpper call or some other silly mistake. With E&C you simply make the trivial change and continue on with what you're really trying to debug. Without it, you restart and take another 3 minutes to get back to where you were. Edit and Continue is a fantastic feature that C# can have but Microsoft hasn't bothered with - probably due to idiots like you that think you're above such a pedestrian capability.

I agree. I think there are so many situations where E&C is extremely useful and this thought of me somehow being a bad coder because I want to use it is total BS. What about all of the XP style methodologies out there where it's all about rapid development and refactoring on the fly??

I AGREE - I am trying to convince people here in my office of the use of C# over VB but MS is making my life difficult by implementing Edit and Continue in VB and not in C# - really seriously missing this feaure !!
Does anyone know for real why MS is not implementing this - I can't believe it is only to do with 'introducing bad programming styles' - we are not asking to write entire methods, classes and other stuff - just simply taking out an i++ statement or similar if that was accidently left in the code !