Roy's at it again, campaigning for IntelliJ and asking Visual Studio to take notice and compete with the advanced developer experience provided by the IntelliJ IDE:

 "I felt like I was not coding alone ... if you decide you should have a new method ... you just type the method name and provide its parameters if necessary.  IDEA will prompt you with an unobtrusive popup with a suggestion to create a new method ... the method will be created in the corresponding class with the proper method signature (including correct parameters), so that you can implement it later"

I saw the same feature demoed by Erich Gamma, (the G in the GoF Patterns book!) when he came to London to talk about Eclipse.  I was so impressed the hairs on my arm stood up.  Forget clapping at the PDC, you know a feature is good when your body reacts with goose bumps.  As I mentioned in a previous post about refactoring, I think this feature would solve a lot of the frustration that Randy mentioned where Visual Studio's Intellisense clobbers any new methods or properties written in tests before the object exists.  It's the difference between thinking of the IDE as a text editor and thinking of it as a developer tool.

Luckily, IntelliJ are developing an IntelliC# add-in for Visual Studio that will bring its intelligence to .NET.  I can't wait to get it.

As Roy laments, what's Visual Studio doing?  I remember the glory days, back when Jim McCarthy (of Dynamics of Software Development fame) was working with the Visual C++ team making the IDE great.  Where's the passion, the spirit, the sense of competition gone?  For all the talk at the PDC there was noticeably little about Orcas, the Visual Studio version after Whidbey.  Visual Studio is good, but it can be even greater.  Let's hope that good things are in store.