Tuesday, March 27, 2007

.Net again

So, I've been working on this .Net project for about a month now. The thing I've enjoyed writing the most? A ruby rakefile to handle our migrations. I started to use NAnt. But, found it lacking. Particularly, I wanted to be able to get a sorted list of files (so I could store my migrations as 001_something_cool, 002_something_else_cool, etc) But, that was easier said than done without writing C# code. A few minutes later I had a rakefile that would do just what I wanted.

I guess if I had to pick a most enjoyable component that was actually in .Net - it would be the comparer (comparator for the Java folk; you say color, I say colour) that allows us to sort our GridView using reflection. Yeah, I love reflection.

I'm sure this is just because I am familiar with Eclipse, but I have to say Visual Studio IDE blows compared to Eclipse. The code browsing/navigation, refactoring, and code shortcuts that Eclipse provides are just amazing. I've tried Resharper and the DXCore & Refactor! Pro add-ins from Developer Express, but neither of them replace the power I get from Eclipse. And those are CommercialWare! SlickEdit does make a pretty cool add-in called Gadgets that provide some neat utilities. I especially like the CommandSpy that keeps track of all the menu commands you've selected, and shows you the shortcut keys when available.

Another piece of CommercialWare that is disappointing is VisualSVN. This is just basically a front-end for Subversion, but all it seems to do is launch TortoiseSVN and refresh your project when you are done in there. Admittedly, it gives you some menu choices to work on specific files. But, again, Subclipse is free - and much more useful.

Ah well, I'll keep on looking for useful add-ins (especially of the free as in beer variety), but I'd like some suggestions to which ones you find indispensable.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

AnkhSVN is a free Subversion plug-in for Visual Studio. It's not without bugs, though it's post-1.0 and fairly stable, and it's been working well enough for me to use against some SourceForge projects.

Hokey said...

visual studio is a glorified notepad when it comes to refactoring, etc. it doesn't even have the simple feature of maximizing a tab that you find in eclipse. AnkhSVN is what i use for subversion control and it ... suffices, again not as a good as subclipse.

Ilya Ryzhenkov said...

John, by "maximizing tab" do you mean Alt-Shift-Enter in Visual Studio?