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Simplify Coding With Visualizers
Take advantage of visualizers in Visual Studio 2005 to make yourself more productive; also learn how to create your own custom visualizers.
by Vikram Srivatsa

June 23, 2005

Technology Toolbox: C#

Once upon a time, IDEs and programming languages were measured by what they enabled you to do.

This remains the case, but languages today are also measured by how quickly they enable you to do it. The Visual Studio IDE and the languages it supports are as much about accelerating developer productivity as about what they let you do. Visual Studio's Rapid Application Development (RAD) features have long featured IntelliSense, as well as the ability to step through code and various debugger windows that aid a developer in debugging. The next version, Visual Studio 2005, officially due out in November, incorporates a couple important new features: debugger visualizers and enhanced DataTips.

Taking advantage of these new features will enable you to create your applications more quickly and easily. This article will take a careful look at Visual Studio 2005 DataTips, explaining how you can take advantage of them to get a richer development experience. You'll also learn how to take advantage of VS 2005's extensibility model to create custom visualizers of your own.

DataTips and visualizers comprise two of several significant new RAD features in the next version of Visual Studio. Other features include code snippets, refactoring, and edit-and-continue for Visual Basic and C#. One important caveat: This article relies on Visual Studio 2005 beta 2, and the features discussed in this article remain subject to change in the final release version.

The new features build on a recent trend in developer tools, where the focus has been shifting toward improving developer productivity. Today's IDE features are as important to drawing developers to a particular development environment as the programming languages themselves, a trend Visual Basic kicked off on the Windows side. Visual Basic attained its great popularity mainly due to the ease of creating applications, enabled principally by its IDE.