Visual Studio Development

When I work on C# programs (which is what I do for a living, so I do it a lot), I work in Visual Studio. Currently, that means VS2008.

VS has lots of wonderful features, including:

1. Intellisense
2. "Go to definition"
3. Integrated building and error output parsing
4. Integrated debugging
   
5. Solution/Project management
6. Windows Forms/WPF designer
7. Basic Refactoring

You can add Re-sharper, and then you get more, including:

1. Compile as you type
2. Code form suggestions
3. Find file by name search
4. Find method/class by name search

This is all wonderful, but it comes at a price. Namely, speed. Because VS can't possibly know when you're going to want what features, it has to prepare them all continuously. This means opening a solution takes forever. Opening the designer takes forever. Building takes forever. Add Resharper and your problems just get worse.

It's a trade-off. Lots of people are willing to sacrifice speed for the convenience of these features. Until recently, I was one of these people.

A lot depends on the kind of work you do. For awhile now, my kind of work has had me opening and closing different solutions many times through out the day. As well as having multiple instances of VS open at the same time.

First I got rid of Resharper. I had to. There were times when I could type faster than the letters could appear on the screen because it was busy compiling my changes. Plus, I realized that I didn't like it's implied style of development. With Resharper, it's assumed that the code you're writing should be perfect the first time. So it's always formatting it for you, and suggesting shorter ways you could write it, or pointing out that you could move this variable from here to there, etc.

I discovered that I don't write code line by line, I write it in "logical units", working through the details. Then I go back and make everything perfect when I'm satisfied with it. My mind is on more than just the one line I'm currently typing. I'm thinking about the whole thing. So when Resharper wants me to stop and think about some minor code form improvement, or when it suddenly moves my code around "formatting" it, it only serves to distract me.

So Resharper had to go. I did miss knowing that I'd typed an error without having to wait for a build. And I also missed being able to open a file by just typing it's name in the search box. But I found those to be very minor niceties overall.

There's this article that Steve Yegge wrote called Effective Emacs. He talks about all kinds of minor little Emacs details. But his larger point is that because he knows how to use Emacs so well, and because it does only what he asks it to, he is very efficient with it.

This got me thinking about Visual Studio, and all the time I spend waiting for it, or clicking around looking for things (files in Solution Explorer, methods/classes in Intellisense). I realized that the power of Visual Studio is that it tries to do so much for you, and hide so much (mostly) irrelevant detail from you. This makes it easier to learn how to develop things. And it can also save you time by generating code, and build scripts, etc for you.

Intellisense is the best example of this. It's always guessing what you're probably trying to type. This is great because it helps remind you what the full method names are, or what parameters they accept.

Visual Studio's whole goal in life is to require the programmer to do as little work and put in as little effort as possible. On the surface of it this seems great. But I suspect that less work and less effort doesn't always result in greater productivity.

For example, it's easier to randomly click through Intellisense, looking for something that might do what you want than it is to look up documentation. But the documentation is more likely to show you the right way to do what you're looking for, and explain it to you. You just have to put in more effort reading through it.

So, wouldn't it be better in the long run to use a tool that is very powerful, but stupid? Allowing you to do exactly what you want, but not trying to guess what you want, and not trying to do it all for you?

It seems quite clear to me that if you're willing to put in the effort, you could get a better development experience using something other that Visual Studio. You'll spend less time waiting for VS to do things for you, and more time thinking about just how you want to do it. You'll get to state what you're looking for, rather than clicking all over trying to find it. Basically, your mind will be more actively engaged, instead of passively waiting for VS to solve problems for you.

I'm not suggesting that Visual Studio is worthless. I'm just suggesting that there may be times when using a different tool would be better, and other times when VS would be better. Why not figure out what those times are, and use the right tool at the right time?

I've been working on that. My tool of choice is gVim, because I know it the best, and I like the modal editing concept better than shortcut key acrobatics. I'm going to write a series of posts documenting everything I've done to try and use Vim to develop C# in an environment where everyone else is using only VS.

In the meantime, let me know what you think about the idea of VS = least possible effort != greater productivity.

Links to Posts in Series:
Vim C# Compiling
Vim TFS Integration
Vim Intellisense
Vim Help Integration
Vim Snippets
Vim Code Folding
Vim to and from Visual Studio
Vim File Editing
Vim Learning
Vim File Navigation