Bring It On

This would not have been news if it wasn’t for the fact that my wife never went to computer school nor has worked in a programming related field, ever.

You see, my wife is a girly girl. The one that thinks first about what to wear and which makeup to apply when she goes somewhere. The one that does her nails 7 times a week or more. The one that likes pink things. The one that makes the best damn cake in the area. You get my point.

Yet, she is now a certified developer. It wasn’t easy – we started with Charles Petzold’s most excellent book Code, then moved on to object-oriented design in general, then finally to the concrete programming language (VB.NET). We developed a couple of small projects and then bought her the material for self-study preparations for the exam. For one of the tests she attended the 4 week course, for the other she just read the books. I helped as much as I could, but she did all the hard work.

I’m so proud. One more developer in the family, yay! On the other hand, she’s a VB person and I am a C# person, so some rivalry is to be expected

Quite often I want to quickly try something out – make a class or two, just a couple of simple methods that exercise certain kind of functionality I am trying to produce.

Running this code in the context of a real solution which consists of dozens of projects only muds the waters. It gets hard to separate and execute just the portions of the code you’re writing and may even throw away.

For cases like this I used to use Snippet Compiler – a simple yet powerful editor and mini-IDE for C#, VB.NET and even JScript.NET. It is convenient because it does not generate project files and other residual files, starts and runs quickly and even reroutes console output to its own output panel. Just perfect for small try-out tests.

Snippet Compiler today is quite dated though and has not been actively developed. But yesterday my good friend and développeur extraordinaire Dejan “sold” me on another excellent alternative – Visual C# Express. Version 2008 just came out and this time you can download a single ISO image of a DVD with all of the Express versions in one convenient package.

It’s great. Works almost exactly the same as its more feature rich cousin editions (Standard and Professional) but starts quickly and just like Snippet Compiler does not leave trail on a disk (see screenshot to the right). You get intellisense, all of the designers, build system… everything is there, except for one thing: multi-targeting (you can only use .NET 3.5). Still, for small test projects this is not an issue at all.

Visual C# 2008 Express, just like all the other Express editions is completely free, no registration is required and it doesn’t expire.

Thanks, Microsoft.