Visual Studio Cognition

[degibson]

Given our various debates in the past on coding practices and IDEs, I thought this five-year-old CodingHorror post would still be germane. It's a good read.
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2005/10/the-cognitive-style-of-visual-studio.html

 

[Ken g6]

This reminds me of the first place I worked where I had to use an IDE. In this case it was Java and NetBeans, but the principle still applies. I'm used to jumping around in my code, sometimes leaving a section unfinished for a time while I work on something else. Probably all syntax-analyzing IDEs make that hard to impossible. I eventually got used to cleaning up my code at least a little before moving to a new section. And I eventually found that the API reference features outweighed the inconveniences.

Funny he should mention that "Using Notepad to code may be an instructive exercise in minimalism for students, but no professional programmer can afford to build software this way." That insurance company was pedantic about what software got installed. They wouldn't let me use my favorite editor, GVim. And for some reason they wouldn't give me a copy of their approved, licensed editor, UltraEdit, even though I had to work in a variety of languages. So I wound up doing a lot of PHP programming in Notepad!

 

[esun]

Programming in Notepad? That's when you know it's time to quit.

I definitely agree, though, that it's very instructive to get used to doing things without an IDE sometimes. I know far too many people who are completely dependent on IDEs (not just for software programming, either---also for LaTeX and VHDL) and have no clue what to do when that's gone or when some manual customization is necessary.

 

[Markbnj]

Petzold's "Programming Windows" was my bible for so many years, and still has a place alongside Richter's Advanced Windows on my shelf. "Puts the h in hWnd," indeed. That post was pretty accurate and insightful for 2005, I think. The problem with Intellisense was real, and it is finally addressed by the "Generate" option in VS2010. You can call a method, access a variable, etc., as if it already existed, right click it, click "Generate" and generate a method stub, declaration, etc. I've found this pretty useful.

His comments on code generation I think were a lot more relevant in the days of MFC. Everybody hated all the macro-laden generated crap that the compiler produced in order to knit the class framework to the underlying Windows and COM APIs. In .NET languages the combination of a modular API to the underlying system, RTTI, and reflection have made generated code a lot less important. For the most part its use these days is relegated to generating mapping classes to allow strongly-typed access to resources, as well as provide hook points for the IDE designer. These are reasonable uses in my view, and the generated code is neither mystifying nor interesting to anybody other than the guy who had to write the generator.

 

[looseratlife]

Except for the VS ide, the rest all suck !! Netbeans intellisense never works productively !!. I still use notepad for developing websites. But I use dev c++ for c++
I dont see why one shouldn't use a IDE.