Re: Documentation frustrations
Re: Documentation frustrations
- Subject: Re: Documentation frustrations
- From: Tim Conkling <email@hidden>
- Date: Wed, 6 Jul 2005 14:06:45 -0400
On Jul 5, 2005, at 2:51 PM, Chris Hanson wrote:
On Jul 5, 2005, at 9:46 AM, Brandon Sneed wrote:
Despite VS.NET's UI being awful, writing code that works is made
extremely easy by the good quality documentation and automation of
common tasks.
Can you elaborate on your latter point (automation of common tasks)
a bit?
-- Chris
I'd like to chime in here. I'm a long-time hobbyist Mac programmer
(about 8 years). Before 6 months ago, I'd never done any Windows
development. I've just recently completed my first job out of
college. It was a 6-month contract position with IBM, developing the
client front-end for some software that will be used by telephone
reps. The client team used VS.NET 2003 and C# for all development.
Despite having no experience with the IDE, language, or .NET
framework when I arrived on the project (about midway through its
development), I was doing meaningful project development within about
a week. I would like to say this is because I'm a brilliant
developer, but it's really due to Visual Studio's time-saving
features. It's not my intent to sound like an MS cheerleader here --
in my defense as a Mac diehard, I will say that VS is the only MS
product that has ever impressed me. It has many problems (many bugs,
an irritating, overly-busy UI, and a poor (IMO) interface editor),
but it does a few things very well:
- Code-completion. The completion list pops up instantly as soon as
you type a period after an object (I was working in C#). For each
method entry in the completion list, the popup window gives you a
description of the method. If the method has overloads, you can cycle
through the descriptions and parameter lists for them. When you
choose a particular method, it fills in the name for you and rather
than filling in placeholders for the parameters, it keeps the
completion window up. After filling in a parameter and typing a
comma, the completion window highlights the name of the next
parameter that the method expects, and gives you a description of it.
Most of the .NET framework is documented in this manner, and if you
document your own code, you will see that documentation in the
completion window.
- Auto-generation of code. As somebody already mentioned, double-
clicking on a interface element in the interface editor will create
the skeleton of a click event handler in the appropriate source file,
and will fill in the event subscribe/unsubscribe code. If you are
manually subscribing to an event (perhaps one that is not UI-
related), the editor will detect this and offer to fill in what it
can. Similarly, if you are overriding a method in a superclass, the
editor will automatically write code for you if you want. These
processes don't interrupt your workflow at all and they are quite
intuitive to use.
- Auto-detection of incorrect code. Anyone who has used MS Word
before is familiar with its red-squiggle-underlining of misspelled
words. The VS editor does the same thing with mistyped code, and it's
surprisingly fast and accurate. Obvious things like missing
semicolons and parentheses are caught, but so are less-obvious things
like mistyped variable names.
- Easy-to-use debugger. I still can't get Xcode to print meaningful
information for my std::string variables, for example (in the summary
column, I just get the custom formatter string printed in gray: size=
{(int)$VAR.size()} "{(char *)$VAR.c_str()}":s). VS's debugger works,
and makes it easy to find the information you're interested in. For
example, you can right-click a variable in the debugger's source view
and choose "Quick Watch", which opens a new window where you can view
just that variable (and, if it's an object, all its members). Or you
can drag a variable from the source view to your own custom "watch"
window, which contains a subset of variables that you're interested in.
- Speed. There's not much to elaborate on here. We know that the
Xcode team is working to give us a faster editor, compiler, and
debugger. CodeWarrior is a good benchmark to shoot for. VS should
also be a benchmark. There is no editor slowdown. Compile times are
incredibly fast. The debugger starts quickly.
Tim
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