If the MS Office team wrote Visual Studio

Andrew Arnott

Some humorous pros and cons to Visual Studio, if the Microsoft Office team were ever to take over. (disclaimer: this is a tongue in cheek post.  No offense — only laughs intended)

1. Visual Studio 2008 would be able to load VC7 projects, modify them in any way VC7 allowed, and save the project back to VC7 format, allowing you to work with others still using VC7. 
2. You could download an extension to VC7 that would allow you to work with VS2008 projects in a limited way.
3. Your projects would open in any copy of Visual Studio just fine, until you added any code to it.  Then VS would refuse to load it until you changed the security settings in Tools -> Options from High to Low.  And you’d still get a security warning at every load.
4. To send your codebase to someone else without allowing them to change it, you would Save to PDF.
5. Source control would be integrated into each individual source file (but you’d have to turn it on first, per file), and merging changes from others would involve Track Changes with strikethroughs and underlines instead of yellows and reds.
6. Source files would become programmable with embedded macro scripts, allowing a change in one part of the source file to affect other areas, perhaps with some intermediate calculation. 
7. Compilation would occur in the background, or instantaneously on demand.
8. No build breaks.  Ever.  But the spell checker might point out some possible areas of improvement.
9. Methods would be phrases and have spaces.
10. Shakespeare would be the default programming language.

Andrew Arnott Principal Software Engineer, Visual Studio Platform

Follow