Visual Studio 2005 Technical Preview.
I've been digging a little through Whidbey and can't help but to be reminded of the awful turn that another good product took several years ago. That product was MS Access. Up until Access 2.0 the functionality available for developers was cleanly thought out. Beginning with Access 95, a general "dumming down " and feature overload began that ended up turning the product into the biggest pig.
I see similar developments in VS 2005. While it shows good improvements in a number of areas, it is also loaded with dumbed down features that are questionable to me. For example, if a developer cannot write his own login page and forms authentication mechanism he shouldn't be coding. And what in the world is all this nonesense with data access code in controls (Data Source Control)? If you've worked with any worthwhile application, you know that keeping the UI as agnostic as possible is a much better way to go. So it seems to me that MS wants to sell VS as the enterprise development tool, but filled it with functionality that appeals to small businesses that need a 5 page web site with a little data thrown in. Go figure.
The clincher here is the tagline that gets used whenever MS demonstrates these new features "Look you can build entire pages with xx lines of code" . The number of lines vary but usually hover around 5-25. Thats exactly what came out of the Access product group back in '95. Its deja vu all over again (pun intended). Look, I really like some productivity improvements, like the refactoring toolbar. But since when is generated code better than hand crafted?
In the end the product strikes me as a mixed bag of goodies. If I ever meet the clown who decided to include c# code with html code in the same page by default I'll give him a piece of my mind. Unless he is the same clown that created the new code-behind model in which you don't necessarily have to set up protected member variables for controls in the aspx protion of the page. No more protected System.Web.UI.Webcontrols.Textbox someText in the declaration section of the page. That'll save a lot of typing.
OK enough griping. There are lots of things to like in ASP.NET 2, C#2 and even VS. I will list them as I find them. Perhaps even reorder them in some kind of importance order.
Cache Dependencies. Having an object in cache or even an output-cached page synched to a table in the db without some file invalidation workaround is absolutely wonderful. Hope it works as advertised, I'm excited about this one.
8:47:05 AM 
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