Okay, I lied, here are several more items for future versions of Visual Studio. The problems I outline here (and elsewhere) might have been mentioned before, but finding the right team at Microsoft to take ownership of these issues is a challenge. We’re constantly told by one team or another that some other sub-section of the “Visual Basic” team handles this issue or that.
- Any code that the Visual Studio designers or wizards creates should leverage the built-in “Read Only” attribute. This should only be over-ridden via extraordinary means. This will prevent any form of mischief that users can cause by editing code that will be replaced at the next whim of VS. This also means this RO code is colored differently.
- Until Edit and Continue is working again for 64-bit, the debug mode should give the developer the option of switching to x86 mode. This means making the Configuration manager active by default instead of having to re-configure it on each project.
- Developers need better tools to build and maintain templates. We need better ways to enable specific configurations (x86/x64) and other persistent state between projects.
- We (still) need spell-check in the code editor for all quoted literals.
- Developer Rights Impersonation: When applications are developed, it’s often done as administrator. Unfortunately when the application must be tested we have to take extraordinary means to setup a “run as” identity to test the application as if it was being run by a restricted rights user. We need a way to describe limited-rights users and choose them when pressing debug.
- References Selector. This dialog is broken. Because of the growing number of references to be selected, it’s increasingly difficult to find the desired reference. We need a way to filter the selections as well as a dialog that’s far easier to expand.
- The Query Editor needs to enable the “maximize” button (as supported in SSMS).
- The ReportViewer Tasks dialog needs to be redesigned to show the actual report being selected without extra keystrokes. Note that the project is shown in the dialog followed by the actual report name. Why not trim off the project name as that is assumed?
- I would like to see better support for stored procedures. I would like to regain the ability to automatically generate the Parameters collection for a selected SP.
- The TableAdapter needs to give developers the option to specify a WHERE clause and input parameters.
