November 24, 2004 .net

Interactive Programming Addiction

So, I’ve never done anything with Python, so I’ve never really figured out what the big deal was. However, if the interactive Python development environment is anything like the experience of XamlPad, I’m glad I haven’t tried it, otherwise I’d never be able to go back.

Oh my god, that interactive model is wonderful! I sat down this afternoon to port my Longhorn Solitaire code to the Avalon CTP and had to completely re-write my GridPanel layout code to use the new Grid because the GridPanel is deprecated. However, I didn’t know a thing about the Grid, so found a great little Grid sample from the WinFX SDK and started the latest version of XamlPad and taught myself how to use the Grid interactively.

Every time I added an element or attribute, I saw the results in real-time. If I screwed up the syntax, I got a red error message in the status bar. I can’t tell you how much pleasure I got adding <ColumnDefinition> and <RowDefinition> elements and setting the Grid.Row and Grid.Column attributes on my cell elements, watching things move around the screen and figuring out Grid the content model. It was fabulous! All development should be like this…