New Years Wish-List

Happy New Year Everyone!  Ok, so I’m a bit late… shoot me<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" /><o:p></o:p>

While everyone is still trying to keep up with their New Year resolutions I decided to forgo the entire process this year and instead focus on my technology wish list for 2004. I’ll accept that I’m as likely to see my wish-list come true as you are to stop eating the chocolate you resolved to give up. But as that didn’t stop you from making your resolutions, I’m not about to allow it to stop me from wishing away. :)

·         To have the C# team come to the realization that Edit & Continue is in fact not the devils playground. Maybe they don’t make typos but I sure do (some 10 in the post alone I bet). Having to restart the entire application to fix a single letter is a massive productivity killer. Edit & Continue, it is your friend.

·         For someone to finally unseal the ImageList component. Or at least implement the ImageList as an interface so we can develop our own. For those of us who build commercial apps with hundreds of windows this is a huge issue. Someone decides that the “New” icon should be changed and we spend the next week changing it in 99 places (yes, 99. Because we always forget to change one someplace).  Hell, think of the memory savings that could be had by only having a single global ImageList rather than 100 separate ones with 99% of the same images in them.

·         A real source code control system API. See that one that you have now? Give it too Frodo and send him to Mt. Doom right away. It is evil and needs to be destroyed. Source Code Control is the most overlooked aspect of software development and the poor API support provided by Visual Studio is doing nothing to help correct it.

·         Yukon by Q2

·         Someone to confirm that there will in fact be an MSDE version of Yukon. I always assumed so but someone pointed out that this has never been explicitly stated.

·         A [Replaced] attribute that goes one step beyond [Obsolete] in that it causes Visual Studio to automatically replace the old reference with the new reference. The best example is with property values persisted in the InitializeComponent method. When you
”Obsolete” a property Visual Studio doesn’t remove the old reference so you get a slew of compiler warnings that you must then delve into generated code to fix. This is even worse if you actually remove the property all together. It would be nice if the system could handle this automatically and use [Replaced(NewFunctionName)] to point to the new property.

Any others I should add to my list?