Whidbey First Impressions

I am very impressed with the stability and richness of this beta. There's a lot of features that I want to check out.

New Views

• Code Defintion View -- displays the declaration of the current selection
• Class Designer -- Allows classes to be manipulate and view graphically and provides direct support for refactoring

Projects and Files

• Item and projects templates can be added by xcopy, rather than through the obscure and complicated process in VS 2003
• Disposable Projects
• Project properties show up as a window
• Ability to include a Win32 resource into a managed application

Debugging

• Expandable Data Tips
• Proxy Classes
• Special Debugging Attributes
• Objects automatically show ToString(), by default
• Special views for strings -- show as Text, XML, HTML

Dynamic Code Formatting

Save Typing

• Refactoring
• Expansions -- Type property and get a whole property expansion with backing store... The UI for this minimizes typing and links indentical variables together, so if you name one variable, all the other variable references are change as well.
• Surround With

Lots of Usability Enhancements Across the Board

• Class View is much more usable.. methods and properties are shown in a separate pane
• Visual docking

I haven't even begun to look at the many changes made to the Windows Forms Designers.

• Easier to change and view the properties of multiple objects
• Guidelines makes it easier to align controls
• A number of new layout engines are provided
• Lots of new polished control
• WebBrowser and ActiveDocument controls (as well as support for HTML document object model)

Comments

[Jim Bolla]

Sounds great. I can't wait to get it installed. Thanks for the overview.