Preview Changes for Refactorings
In a comment, Robert Watkins proposes a preview mode for refactorings.
Funny how things work out. The original implementation of Whidbey Refactorings included an optional preview window that was 100% annoying. Every time it came up, I would kick myself for forgetting to uncheck the option. It was that bad.
I trust our refactoring features to do the right thing, so the idea of reviewing the results in some dedicated UI seems like a waste of time. I know it works, I just want to move on.
We saw in usability studies that people wanted to check out what a Refactoring really did, at least the first couple times they used it. But, they were comfortable using existing features (like Find in Files) to understand the result. So, I argued that we should cut the preview changes window alltogether.
No one agreed with me, so we wrote a new preview changes dialog. It's a lot better. It's so much better, that when it appears, I don't mind. In fact, I find myself reading through the results to understand the changes.
Weird.