Why Edit and continue is a GOOD thing

Frans for one time I disagree with you, not on everything but Web projects.

If like me, you embed some HTML in your code, it's nice to be able to change a badly formed tag or a single hexadecimal color value without the pain to stop the Debugger and restart again.

Try to consider the amount of wasting time just doing Start and Stop debugging.

I agree with you that the developer has to think.

I watched this morning the Whidbey demo on video, and I like the idea that the IDE will show me the line where the error come, edit and continue.

So many times, exception of you own logical errors, errors messages thrown by .Net could be very obscure, and often not related to the exact problem.

As an example, I remember yesterday that my code, working smoothly on my development machine, constantly beak on my production server.

The error messages, the trace didn't give me enough information on the real problem.

And finally I discovered that it was a stupid thing regarding the rights access on a folder.

Rather than giving me the exact issue, VS was just saying something else (don't remember exactly what was the message !).

With Edit and Continue, I would surely impove my productivity, testing different options to solve my issue.

For the Web development, we are, as developers, pushed more and more to embed some templates elements in the code behind.

Fine, but if I test something, and I just want to try a new value, with E&C I don't waste time.
And if I am not happy back to the start.

I am a VB developer, but I write also some code in C#, and I am sad that MS don't implement this feature in every language.

 

2 Comments

  • I agree. Edit and Continue is a good thing, there are lots of other things I would much rather have than Edit and Continue though... that is very low on the list of features I would like to see (in fact, low enough not to be on my wish list). Definately something I could live without (even though it would be nice). If I had to choose between generics and edit and continue or iterators and edit and continue, I would definately choose the alternatives.

  • Jesse I agree too. I would like to see some improvments on the HTML editor too.



    Some ideas about this part ?



    What about also some XML/XSL editor ?



    I also seen this morning that on the video, we are going to use more and more windows everywhere.



    What's about giving people a 30" widescreen :-)

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