Joe Nalewabau has one very important addition point to make about the new key bindings in Visual C# 2005: while the VC# team will be providing a bunch of key bindings based on how things are arranged, e.g. Ctrl+W, S to show the Solution Explorer from the Window menu, 90+% of the old key bindings will continue to work, e.g. Ctrl+Alt+L to show the Solution Explorer. I worry that the 90% coverage won't be like uptime, where 90% is generally just fine, but more like speech recognition, where anything less than 99.9% just bugs people. I'm keeping my key bound fingers crossed...
Joe Nalewabau, a Lead PM on the Visual C# team, admitted today that he was responsible for the VC# keyboard randomization process for Visual Studio 2005 and describes the thought process that he went through to get there. I admit that Joe makes a good case for changing the key bindings, but I hate the idea of learning a whole new set (especially since, because I’m a keyboard boy, I’ll be crippled until I learn the new bindings). If Joe would swear on a stack of user manuals that the key bindings would never, ever change again, I’d be happier about it. (Rocky: “Again? That trick never works!“ Bullwinkle: “This time fur shure!“)
Lately, when the subject about how to actually secure a .NET app or component comes up, a magic phrase is uttered: “threat modeling.” Apparently, this is the thing that tells you how folks could use your well-intentioned code to do bad things. And on a mailing list with a fairly select membership (although not too select — I’m on it : ), the Swiderski, Snyder book Threat Modeling was recommended. And the free threat modeling tool that goes along with the book is hosted right on microsoft.com, which I take as a sign of quality. Model those threats towards a happier, healthier you!
After spending a bunch of time with various partial IBindingList implementations, I just stumbled onto a brand new one in the Visual Studio 2005 Community Technology Preview: BindingList<T>. It’s not done yet, e.g. sorting doesn’t work, but the model is certainly what you’d want, e.g. you create a BindingList<Person>, bind it to something smart, like a DataGrid or a DataGridView, and you’re able to edit instances of your custom type or add or remove instances, as well as search or sort instances, just like you’d need a custom implementation of IBindingList for today. Very nice.
I find that in the process of learning about something, I often dig through a lot of places before I come up with what I’m looking for.
In the case of Visual Studio 2005 Team System (aka “Burton”), I wanted to know a lot more about the features that MS was building into VS for teams, including much more flexible source code control integration, web site functionality and stress testing, static code analysis like FxCop and perf. analysis built right into the build system and stats recording as part of the normal workflow for project management reporting.
In the process of gathering these details, here are the places I went:
