Tyler posted a link to a blog post about someone preferring a text editor over an integrated development environment (IDE). Naturally, my first thought is, wow, who thinks like this?
My
first real exposure to development work was with the old ASP, which was
frankly a shitty scripting language. You could use Notepad, FrontPage
or a stone tablet to "develop" scripts. And why the heck not? You ran
the page and it either worked or it didn't.
In 2001 I got into
the .NET beta thing pretty early, along with the new Visual Studio. I
think the visual stuff in the app to this day came along to pacify the
old VB6 crowd, but I don't know of anyone doing serious development
using the visual tools. I've always been one to peck out the markup and
C# in text.
And boy, that Intellisense is worth the price of
admission. Type "<asp:h" and then tab and you've got yourself a
Hyperlink control. Type "i" then tab and you've got ID=". In the C#
side of things, "pub-tab-vo-tab" gets you to public void.
Now add
in ReSharper, and I'm doing things like Ctrl-F to format code, optimize
using statements and namespace references, ditch redundancies (like
using "this" in a class when you don't have to), etc. Or highlight some
private members, Ctrl-Ins and get public accessors generated for me. Or
select and choose extract method, and just like that I have a logical
piece of code broken out into its own method with the right parameters.
Visual
Studio doesn't get you off the hook for knowing how to design software,
but it does free you of the burden of knowing every class name in the
framework or dealing with mundane syntax issues. That's empowering and
saves time, and best of all, allows you to concentrate on solving
actual problems.
To that extent, I think Microsoft has done a
pretty terrible job in marketing that ability outside of the core
people who already know. When you read a blog post like that one, you
can only wonder what they'd think if they saw you working with VS. It's
far from perfect, but it makes my life crazy easier.