Monday, July 12, 2010

July Session - Does the world end if you stop using Visual Studio

I have a mate who is a hardcore C programmer. For years he has been writing his code in Turbo C++ 3.0 for DOS which was a state of the art IDE made by Borland in 1991. Recently I convinced him to download and try XNA development with Visual Studio and he was amazed by some of the things that I now take for granted. "This IntelliSense thing means I don't have to remember all those methods names. It's totally awesome," he tells me. And he's right. I can basically no longer code without it.

Or is that true? Are my abilities so tied to a particular tool that I am totally ineffectual without it? What does an IDE (any IDE) really do for me and does it make me a better programmer? Or is it a crutch that limits my abilities and encourages me to do things I would otherwise avoid like the plague? In short, will the universe end if I no longer have Visual Studio?

These questions and more are the basis of a recent experiment by Garry Stewart involving switching to Vim for development. He's going to come and tell us about his experiences.

What: Does the world end if you stop using Visual Studio?
When: Wednesday 14th July, 6pm - ?
Where: 43 Below Bar & Bistro, Corner of Barrack Street and Hay Street (undergound across from MacDonalds)
Cost: Free!

Hope to see you there.

1 comment:

  1. If anyone is trying to get the 'Edit with Vim' explorer context menu working in a 64-bit windows explorer I've described how to do it here: http://jystic.com/2010/07/28/edit-with-vim-x64/

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