# Whidbey Beta 2

I was at an MSDN event tonight, regarding security in .NET. That wasn't so interesting in itself, although [the presenter](http://weblogs.asp.net/adamga) was good. The really cool thing was the exposition of some of the cool new features in [Visual Studio 2005 (Whidbey)](http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/whidbey/default.aspx). The things I was most impressed with were the "refactoring" and the renaming capabilities.   
  
Refactoring allows you to hilight a bit of code, then right-click on it, and go Refactor/New Function. This will take that bit of code, find all the variables it was using, and set up a function for that bit of code with all the variables as parameters. Fucking cool shit.   
  
Renaming is like a search and replace in context. Say you had a variable 'name'. Not an uncommon thing. But you also use the text 'name' in a bunch of your comments, or other variables like 'username'. You can use the renaming feature to only search and replace the text where it is referencing the variable in question. I can see that one being extremely useful.

*Originally posted on Tuesday, 2005-02-08 at 23:31:47.*