New features in Whidbey, are you sure ?
Yes the title of this post is surely provocative but yesterday I tried to explain in a post that some of the 'new' features in Whidbey should be indeed there already in VS 2003.
We know the first one Edit and Continue and others like HTML formatting.
Formatting a document is not a new feature, a lot of editor can do that already pretty well.
Intellisense is another point, how this useful function can't be complete today ?
I like to say that some fellow developers inside the PDC are actually starting to think the same.
Today has been a bit less eventful than yesterday. This morning there was the keynote speech by Eric Rudder, a vp from Microsoft. He introduced Visual Studio 'Whidbey', Sql Server 'Yukon', and the improved support for mobile devices.
The presentation was pretty good, although I had seen some of the new features from Whidbey, since I'm in the alpha program. I have to admit though, that I haven't spend nearly as much time on trying the alpha as originally planned. Since it's now officially announced, it means that we can discuss more on the features and functionality of the new development environment. The people at the PDC are, however, not allowed to make copies of the software, but I guess that with 7000 attendees, that will prove impossible to enforce. So those of you that were not here will surely see and even get more details on Whidbey. Microsoft will also spread the word of course.
Even though I wasn't as impressed now as I was when I got the first glimpse of Whidbey, that doesn't mean that the improvements to the tool are huge. But when you reflect, they are now giving features back that were in previous tools (like 'edit-and-continue') and added features that should have been there a long time ago (like html formatting). It almost seems like this is Microsoft's strategy. First, they give something that leaves much to be desired (remember dll-hell?) and then they provide a solution for the problem that they created in the first place. And now everybody is happy (the manager and the developer/administrator). Good marketing and having a marketing degree, I can totally understand the strategy. ;-)