“Visual Studio Team Suite 2008 Development Edition”
Whoever names the products at Microsoft should have been replaced a long time ago. If this were Apple or Macromedia, this would be called “Wildcat” or something. It would sound better, be more memorable, and be one third as long.
Over the weekend I installed Visual Web Developer 2007 Express Edition (again, surely a cooler name could be given to a snappy, slick and FREE version of VS), and was really impressed.
There is, of course a massive difference between the two (including the price), but Express is just cooler. It’s faster, for one thing, and the graphics and color scheme are nicer. And (and this is what prompted this post), it was features like intellisense turned on by default.
Yes, that’s right. The big daddy version doesn’t offer any suggestions when you type: variable name dot. You have to go to Tools | Options | Text Editor | All Languages, and select “Auto list members” and “Parameter information” before you get that feature.
For a while I just blankly tried over and over, typing in something and pressing “.” and I thought there is NO way I’m doing .NET programming without this feature. If someone — for some strange reason — doesn’t like it, they can turn it off, but SURELY that person would be in the minority.
That was the first thing I noticed. The second was that it was noticeably slower than Express, but I guess that’s not surprising. The third is that it seemed a little flaky. I loaded up a project that I’d started in the Express edition, and it complained about being unable to find an ASP.NET master page, but only for default.aspx. All the other pages that used it worked fine. Default.aspx found its master page at runtime, so it wasn’t a typo or something.
I created a new page and then copied the content of default.aspx into it, then deleted default.aspx and renamed the new page to replace the default page, and the warning went away. Not the best first impression.