Visual Studio: Evaluation

Visual Studio (VS) is really huge and complex. But it does a lot for the programmer. (Sometimes way too much: I had a student assign a variable name to the wrong field, so her code was trying to fetch the text of a label instead of an input box. When we changed the name of the label, VS automatically changed the code to match the new name, keeping her initial error in place!)

I have had my students build a mini-calculator in a window with buttons and input fields in their first week of programming. That's not bad: it would take me a few months to get them there without something like Visual Studio. And it now supports Python! I may give my agent system a GUI interface using VS.

Comments

  1. ”Sometimes way too much: I had a student assign a variable name to the wrong field, so her code was trying to fetch the text of a label instead of an input box. When we changed the name of the label, VS automatically changed the code to match the new name, keeping her initial error in place!"

    That's the way it is supposed to work. When you.change the name of an object, Visual Studio updates references to it so you are not left with mismatched source code. You guys should have changed either changed the name of the label by editing the source code directly or changed the name of the object that the field referenced in its "Properties" dialog.

    "And it now supports Python!"

    It can support any language. Look up Visual Studio Shell.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. "That's the way it is supposed to work."
      Samson, I 100% understand the Microsoft *intended* it to work this way.
      "When you.change the name of an object, Visual Studio updates references to it so you are not left with mismatched source code."
      Yeah, but we WERE left with mismatched source code, so their intention totally failed!

      Delete
  2. I haven't used it in a while, but have long thought that Visual Studio is one of Microsoft's better products. By developers, for developers...

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Yes, it is impressive how little code you have to actually write!

      Delete

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