Applause-o-meter

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As an ISV, it's fun to see what product features folks are excited about based on spontaneous applause during a presentation.  Martyn did a session today at C++ Connections that was a kind of greatest hits tour of the new stuff for C++ developers in the VS 2005 IDE.  There's a ton of new stuff in there, but the items that got the cheers are:

  • Debugger visualizations for STL container objects.  Watches and tooltips in the debugger are STL-aware, so instead of having to drill down n levels of within an object or write clunky expressions to see what you want, it just shows you want makes sense.  For example, the tool tip for a vector<int> is visually represented like an array of ints, and each element is even modifiable within the tooltip.
  • Key bindings for Emacs and Brief (this one actually received outright hoots and whistles).  Programmers develop amazing muscle memory for editor keystrokes, and enabling them to leverage that muscle memory is a big productivity win.  Now if I can just convince someone to give me the old Turbo C / Turbo Pascal key bindings...  <g>
  • Better visual treatments for window docking.  Gone are the exciting days where you never quite knew where or how an IDE window was going to dock.  The IDE now provides visual cues, including a translucent blue shadow that indicates where and how the window will dock.