ISerializable - Roy Osherove's Blog

The one thing that tells me IntelliJ is much better than VS.NET is that it seems that the IDE knows what's inside the editor: it's aware of the meaning of the code, it's not looking at it as ascii characters.

In other words: the IDE views the world in an editor but works with the world inside itself, the editor's contents is a view on that world and the developer alters that world, not the contents of the viewer (the editors contents) although for the developer it seems that the developer is altering texts.

The big advantage of this is that the IDE can be ultra smart and still be fully able to present the developer the code in whatever format he wants and persist that format. I get the feeling in VS.NET this is not the case: the editor looks at the text as text, it doesn't use a set of elements inside that are represented by text in an editor, which results in all kinds of crap, like the lack of serious functionality to alter code inside a texteditor from a macro, using intelligent knowledge (f.e. create a region for properties and one for member variables and add a property in one region and a member which is used by that property in the other. This is clumbsy in VS.NET now, because hte editor isn't aware of what's inside itself: every character is the same. IntelliJ seems to work totally different (no wonder, the MVC pattern is a cornerstone of the Java API).

Whidbey seems to change this a bit, lets hope it will be on par with IDEA.

This is a great piece of work Roy. I'm glad that someone in the Microsoft community is highlighting the innovations in the Java IDE's. I love competition like this when it leads to improvements in developer tools. Like you say, I hope the Visual Studio team are tracking these changes. It looks like Whidbey's refactoring support is a little less than half of what IntelliJ provides, hopefully the Longorn version (Orcas?) will go the rest of the distance.

Woah, those are really cool features :-) Can't those features be added via addins to VS7? Afterall, if MS do it, they'll be killing some poor component vendor somewhere.

ReSharper