Whidbey Beta 2

I was at an MSDN event tonight, regarding security in .NET. That wasn't so interesting in itself, although the presenter was good. The really cool thing was the exposition of some of the cool new features in Visual Studio 2005 (Whidbey). 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.