Visual Studio 2005 TS Beta 2

I finally received my Visual Studio 2005 Team System Beta 2 in the mail!

It took about 3 weeks to get here. I’m very excited. I plan on converting BRayTracer to use VS 2005.

It’s on track to take about 90 minutes to install. Installation of the compact framework failed, so I’m repairing that component. According to the log, it failed because another installation was in progress.

Features I’m looking forward to?

  • Refactoring – many free IDEs have them, it’s about time VS did too.
  • Improved IntelliSense – I know, IntelliSense is a crutch, but it’s a nice crutch to have–better than memorizing the API for Windows, .Net, MFC, and whatever sub-systems you’re working with.
  • The class designer – the old Add Method/Add Field was too slow and unwieldy to use.

There are a lot of other nice things that are in there. Check out the full list here.

Something I’d like to see that I don’t think is in there: change the type of a variable. I can foresee difficulties in this, but it would be a valuable feature.

[code lang=”cpp”]
float X;
[/code]

could be changed to

[code lang=”cpp”]
Coordinate X;
[/code]

and everywhere that variable is used, all the functions it gets passed to could be changed. As I said, there could be difficulties in this, but it would be powerful functionality.