Every time someone tells how powerful today’s computers are
and how one should always trade performance for good architecture, testability
and thousand other great things - I want to hit guy on the head. And I'm not a
violent person. It just sucks to right click in the windows explorer and wait
20 seconds before context menu shows up or get "calculating remaining
time" when trying to copy files around (yes, I'm still getting those in my
all powerful Vista occasionally). Apparently, today’s computers have so much
power that they can't concentrate on such minuscule tasks, and processor has to
do complicated calculations in the background just to keep itself entertained.
I downloaded Web Developer Express 2008 (final RTM release) yesterday, have no
idea what its architecture looks like but I'm really happy with this product.
It is fast and it is smart and the whole experience can be summarized as surprisingly
painless. My absolutely favorite feature so far – multi-targeting. When I tried
to open existing Asp.net 2.0 site, it simply asked me if I want to upgrade it
to 3.5 or use it as is. And when I chose the second, it promptly loaded only
2.0 features, no pause no nothing. And everything just worked without a glitch.
It seems faster and more responsive than VS 2005, the intellisense jumps out
faster and only shows relevant items, Ajax is built in into both framework
(3.5) and IDE, CSS support looks awesome, visual designer much improved and
tons of other little things just got better. I liked it so much that returning
back to VS 2005 at work this morning felt like going back to Chicago
from Caribbean vacations in January. If you
didn’t get your hands on it yet – you should!