A Sneak Preview of Visual C# Whidbey

MSDN has an article about some of the new features in C#/Whidbey.  It's a pretty neat article that talks about  the language enchancements and new features in Visual Studio.  I'm most interested in Generics and Partial Types at this point.  Generics will give me an easy way to create custom collections of business objects.  I'll be able to define one “generic” collection that all my business objects can use.  Right now I'm creating type specific collections.

Partial Types will really help with code generation.  Partial Types allow a class to be defined in more than one physical file.  I can use a code generator to provide some of the basic functions and properties to match my database.  Then I can add additional code in a second file.  Any changes to my database or cod generation template will only affect the generated file and not my addtions in the second file.  It's a minor point but it's becoming a pain as I do more and more with CodeSmith.

Visual Studio gains a feature called Expansions.  Basically this allows you to easily copy in code snippets and then update certain parameters.  For example, I could have a snippet to create a simple public property and then just change the name and datatype. Damian linked to a similar tool called QuickCode.NET the other day.  I haven't had a chance to play with it but it looks interesting.

So I'm ready for Whidbey.  Can I have it now please?  :)

Show Comments