VB Refactoring

A few weeks ago, I wrote about Edit and Continue support for C# in Visual Studio 2005, in response to overwhelming customer feedback. Thanks for your wonderful words of support and great feedback.

 

We’ve also had tremendous feedback on the MSDN Product Feedback center among the VB community asking for Refactoring support. (If you’re not already familiar with Refactoring, click here for a brief explanation.) As many of you know from reading the VB Team Blog, the VB team is NOT going to be able to implement Refactoring in Visual Studio 2005. This is disappointing to all of us and I wanted to talk a little bit about what went into that decision.

 

The VB team spent a great deal of time investigating how they could add Refactoring to VB 2005 and were very passionate about finding ways to get it done while still delivering on all the other feature commitments that we’ve made. It was a long, drawn-out, hard discussion internally and has become an emotional issue on the blog after they posted the status. When the team was trying to plan how to implement this feature, they were also faced with the reality of having a lot of work that needed to be done before we could deliver a great product to you all with quality on the already committed feature set, and refactoring is a large and complex feature.

 

Was the VB team listening to their customers? Absolutely. In the end, I discussed the feature and what it would take to implement with the team and decided that we could not fit it into our plans for VS 2005 without significantly delaying the entire Visual Studio 2005 product release. This was a hard decision and trade-off that we had to make. Deciding not to implement a feature that has community support and passionate advocates internally is one of the hardest decisions involved with shipping great software. Refactoring in VB is on the list of features that we will consider after we get done with Visual Studio 2005.  

 

VB.NET in Visual Studio 2005 is our best VB ever. With the return of Edit and Continue, more than 500 Intellisense code snippets, My, AutoCorrect and literally dozens of other VB features, I am confident that developers are going to love it. We’re making the hard decisions that we need to make in order to get a great Visual Studio 2005 product to you as soon as we can.

Namaste!