Yes, I miss this feature too. What I find annoying is that there is
now no way to toggle the feature back. Another annoyance it the
removal of parenthesis on the new constructor.
Dim cn as New SqlConnection() 'old
Dim cn as New SqlConnection 'new
I remember of the selling points of VB.NET was it was consistant. All
function and subs 'now must have parens'
Then in version 1.1 the parens disappear when you type them in for a
default constructor.
I suppose this is keeping with the idea of - make VB.NET easier and
make C# more powerful. Funny thing though, C# was to get generics and
VB.NET wasn't. But now both are getting it.
Walt Ritscher
[quoted text, click to view] "Patrick Cannon" <pcannon@bandag.com> wrote in message news:<234f701c38c2e$748abee0$a601280a@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
