Yet another customer request - VB Refactoring

I blogged the other day about the top customer issues that we have fixed based on customer feedback via the MSDN Feedback Center. That basically talks about that the things that we have fixed in Visual Studio 2005. There are other ways we respond to customer feedback. One such way is working hand in hand with our partners. A great example of this is the support for VB Refactoring.

VB Refactoring was one of the top requests from our customers. For those of you that aren’t familiar with refactoring, it’s a set of common operations to allow you to restructure pieces of your code. Examples include reordering parameters on a method, extracting code to create a new method and creating an overload of an existing method.

Several months ago, I blogged about why we won’t be able to add support for refactoring in Visual Basic 2005. Though we couldn’t add this support to our product in this go-around, nonetheless because of the overwhelming customer demand, our VB team went out and investigated solutions from some of our development partners that could help provide refactoring. They found that Developer Express, one of our VSIP partners, had implemented a fantastic refactoring solution for Visual Basic developers. In partnership with Developer Express, we’re pleased to make Refactor! available free of charge to Visual Basic 2005 developers.

Even though VS 2005 hasn’t shipped yet, you can download Refactor! now and try it out. I personally think this does a great job of integrating into Visual Studio and provides a tremendous user experience. So far, we’ve received a lot of positive feedback from users around this tool and the experience. Give it a try – I’d love to hear what you think about the tool.

Namaste!