Zac Bowling’s Blog

I found this while surfing. Charles Petzold dives deep into what the VisualStudio IDE has done for us in the past 10 years and what we might see in the future.

DoesVisualStudioRotTheMind?

[Talking about IntelliSense]… And I think it’s making us dumber. Instead of finding out exactly the method I need, or instead of trying to remember an elusive property name, I find myself scrolling through the possibilities that IntelliSense provides, looking for a familiar name, or at least something that seems like it might do the job.

I feel the same way. I loved VisualStudio the first time I tried it and I couldn’t believe the amount of time it saved me. I used it in VB and C++ and I moved right into C# when .NET came out. I have written a bunch of code in VisualStudio over the years, but now that I’m involved in Mono more and more, I’m on my Linux desktop more then ever. The first time I opened up a text editor to start writing C# without VS was almost painful.

It was simply amazing how dependent I found myself on it. I couldn’t remember basics. I realized I used to InteliSense my way to everything and couldn’t remember exactly where anything was. The lack of color coding was a little confusing right off but I quickly learned how to get around that and set that up in VI. I challenged myself to write a relatively simple application without intelisence and see how far I would get in an hour and when I was done, I barely had 2 classes. I kept it up and picked up things naturally. I started to learn how to navigate MSDN/Monodoc in a few seconds and how Google was the best at finding more complete answer then what Intelisense tells me. I was also shocked to find myself writing out a bunch of stuff that VS did for me. I got to learn the compiler, library signing, and all the ins and outs of deployment. It brought my understanding so much farther in such a little amount of time. I also found out that I had done somethings completely wrong in the past, just being blind to what was going on infront of me.

Its like when I program in PHP. I learned all sorts of techniques since there isn’t a good equal to VS for PHP. I found that going to “http://php.net/(some function name)” I could get the documentation page very quickly and that helped a bunch but at the same time I learned the function and after a few times, it was written into my brain.

Python is the same way. I learned to navigate pydoc like a champ.

We need to improve our help systems in Mono. It sort of sucks when we have to look up some function like “System.Windows.Forms.
DataGridPreferredColumnWidthTypeConverter.ConvertFromInvariantString”.

Anyways..

Going to have something up on MonoAddict.com soon though