Our communtiy adds the C to the VS 2005 CTP
I think the community can make the CTP drops much more useful to all of us.
MS said it: VS 2005 CTP is not a beta. VS 2005 CTP is not a beta. VS 2005 CTP is not a beta. VS 2005 CTP is not a beta. Developers.
The Problem:
The expansions in C# - one of my new favorite features of visual studio - no longer work well. That is, they still produce an "expansion" when you type the shortcut, but....
- You have to hit tab twice now, and Ctrl-Alt-M, X is gone (sort of replaced by [Ctrl-R, X], but entirely different behavior). It took me a few tries to get 'em going, because they show up in the intellisense menu (now), so you'd assume that just one tab would work (or selecting with mouse, or hitting ). Nope.
- The cursor position is all screwed up. For example, with "prop", the cursor goes to the beginning of the file. Oops.
- The expansion vars (places where you type in items that get replaced) are no longer navigable with "tab".. Well, they do get selection rectangles around them when you hit tab, but the cursor isn't moved around.
- When you enter a expansion replacement area, all the text in that area isn't highlighted. You have to delete what's there, then type new content.
It's much, much, much less useful and useable than the PDC bits. If I wanted to play with expansions, I may be better off using the PDC drop. I didn't know that until digging in a bit. However, I may be wrong - perhaps there's something else different (and better) that I missed...
So anyway - The Solution. You.
Dave Bettin and I are setting up a Wiki where the community can post and track these changes, figure out CTP breaks what feature, what CTP adds what feature, etc. -- A community-built running change log that will allow for interaction as well.
Why? If I'm reading correctly, these CTP drops will be somewhat frequent. I'd love to have this "running change log" so that someone using CTP7 knows that if they want to play with some specific new feature (say, the Data Container in windows forms) they should use CTP5 instead because it's broken in CTP7. Or a person looking for the refactorings knows that moving to CTP2 is worth the headache because it adds twelve new ones.
Is this a dumb idea? Would it provide any benefit to anyone? Comment here and let me know. We should have something up quite soon, but if no-one wants it, we won't sink the effort in.
Is this a good idea but needs more oomph? Is there something that must be included? Comment here and let me know.
[This entry was cross-posted from Philip Rieck's full blog.]