Taking Off The Training Wheels

I've had some technical interviews recently. One of the hard parts of being interviewed is the part where you're asked to do some whiteboard coding. In the past the statement "could you write some code on the whiteboard" has caused my brain to reset and has left me standing there, with pen in hand, struggling with the simplest of coding concepts.

Visual Studio is an excellent tool, and makes me incredibly productive, but I think that I've learnt to lean on it too often.

So, I decided to take off the "training wheels" and spend a few weeks writing code without any help from Visual Studio. No IntelliSense, no F1 Help, so code snippets or auto-complete. I'm a big fan of Notepad2 and decided to use this for editing source code, and use csc.exe direct from the command line to compile my code. Notepad2 provides syntax highlighting for many languages, including C#, and the text zooming and visual brace matching make it a more hospitable place to work than standard Notepad, but without auto-complete or IntelliSense I was forced to do something I've not done for a while... use my brain.

I'm certainly not going to be throwing Visual Studio away. The productivity boost that such tools give you is immense. However, during those two weeks I remembered two important things. The first was how to code. The second was that I really enjoyed coding. I guess it's more fun coding when you know it's all your own work.