App Building

The C# PM team is spending Wednesday-Friday of this week on app building, where we spend time using the product to write real apps. We book a conference room in a building away from our main building, put OOF messages on our email, and then spend our time programming (and reporting the bugs we find). I'm running the build that we're going to be giving out at TechEd at the end of the month, and I'm working on my GPS tracking project. I'll need to back-port it to Everett when I'm done, since the project is destined to be featured in a C# column.

Today I wrote a windows forms control that does graphing. The cool part is that it supports multi-level zooming in on the data. Tommorrow I'll hook it up with my existing app, which uses MapPoint, and then go from there.

This is the first time I've used a fairly recent Whidbey build, and I'm pretty happy with the way it feels. The refactoring works well (when I remember to use it), and Intellisense is bothering me less (in early Whidbey versions it was a little too aggressive about coming up).

Finally, the new debugging value inspection is great. I did a fair amount of debugging today, and I didn't have to go to the watch or locals window the whole time.