Lloyd Dupont
10/7/2003 12:31:00 AM
well I'm quite surprized.
but well I don't use VB but C#, however it's hard to believe you can't
browse the internal field with VB, as you can with C# & C++...
"Patrick Cannon" <pcannon@bandag.com> wrote in message
news:048001c38c2e$d2728290$a101280a@phx.gbl...
> I have been using VB.NET since its beta release a few
> years ago. I was blown away by its debugging
> capabilities. The ability to drill down into the member
> variables of an object in the watch window was
> priceless. This feature was not available in VB6. It
> was a great way to browse an object without having to
> know all the private member variables of an entity. This
> was one of the features that allowed me to accelerate my
> namespace knowledge, allowing development to be
> productive.
>
> With the release of Visual Studio .NET 2003, Microsoft
> decided "by design" to remove this capability completely
> from VB.NET. Instead of giving the user an option to
> enable this feature, Microsoft decided all VB.NET
> developers did not need it. I find this attitude
> presumptuous. The other languages available in VS 2003
> retained this feature, while VB developers, who got used
> to debugging in this fashion, were left high and dry.
> They didn't even remove it cleanly. The plus sign still
> appears in the watch windows making the developer believe
> that variable browsing is available, but when you click
> the plus sign to expand the object to view the member
> variables, the plus sign just disappears.
>
> I find the exclusion of valuable debugging features and
> the lack of quality of VS 2003 very troubling. It seems
> that Microsoft has regressed with their latest release of
> Visual Studio. Currently, we have thirteen corporate
> developers with Universal subscriptions designing and
> deploying distributed applications primarily using
> VB.NET. And now we have found the task of debugging
> cumbersome and unproductive. I hope Microsoft can find a
> way to reintroduce this functionality before our
> subscriptions are up. I would hate to have to spend the
> next year switching our development platform, because
> Microsoft feels the need to spurn the devoted developers
> that utilize the tools offered by Microsoft.
>