Refactoring: Not for VB 2005 (for the most part)

The problem with making confident predictions about the future is that time has a way of making a liar out of you despite your best intentions. As Steven posted Friday, VB will not have any refactoring features beyond “rename symbol” in VB 2005. This was an extremely painful cut and one that we tried to move heaven and earth to avoid, but in the end we didn’t feel we could get the features into the product in a high-quality way without causing serious risk to our shipping goals. Balacing the cries for refactoring against the cries for us to ship as soon as possible was difficult, and we really regret the fact that it ain’t going to happen this time (for the most part… it’s not like rename symbol is chopped liver or anything!).

On the other hand, it does mean that we get a while longer to have lots of colorful, humorous arguments about whether we should have a “Refactoring” menu in VB or not. Oh, joy… 

40 thoughts on “Refactoring: Not for VB 2005 (for the most part)

  1. Fan

    Is there any other "big" changes in BETA2 (and the final release) except refactoring? C# can get a such complex feature (EnC) so we have reasons te believe that VB will have something more too. If not, VB can hardly attract more developers who have already chosen C#.]]>

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  2. Phil Wells

    Serge – If MS had left a compiler out of VS.NET but 3rd parties were providing one would you be satisfied with that too? Refactoring support is no different. If VS is supposed to be a fully-functional IDE it needs to have it built in. JetBrains’ ReSharper is a great tool but should we really have to shell out an extra $100 on top of the cost of VS.NET?

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  4. Greg Low

    The irony in all this is that refactoring support would most help with the migration of the VB6 folk’s code, the very people we seem to be stuffing the language up to help.

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  7. Karl

    # of people that would switch to C# for iterators
    is less than
    # of people who understand how iterators will help them
    is less than
    # of people who actually understand iterators
    is less than
    # of people who’d like to better understand iterators
    all of which is a lot less than
    # of people who know and or care what an iterator is
    ]]>

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  8. Dan Blake

    I’m having a little trouble with the third-party tool concept for refactoring. Why would a third-party vendor want to spend a large amount time and money developing an extensive product, when Microsoft has said that it will put the functions in VS in the future and eliminate the need for the third-party product? The two products that Microsoft mentions on their website as solutions either are not specific to refactoring (kinda like using a bulldozer when what you need is a good shovel). Or they are difficult to use, incomplete, and buggy.

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  11. Jim

    This is so stupid. Refactoring is one of the biggest improvements in VS.NET 2005. I can’t believe MS would drop the ball on this one. Are they trying to get VB developers to quit using the language?

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  15. Jim

    > prioritised the My feature
    > above refactoring. It doesn’t
    > even come near in
    > usefulness. Agreed. AFAIK, the My pseudo-namespace doesn’t give us anything we couldn’t already do. Refactoring is much more important to me. > I know that existing .NET
    > (VB) devs are slowly losing
    > faith in the language Count me among the people who’s losing faith. Microsoft needs to make up it’s mind: Is VB.NET a toy language or a tool for professional developers. Which is it going to be?]]>

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  16. Doug e. Fresh

    VB is supposed to be the easiest of languages to learn.C# should be used by those doing new projects that have some experience in VB. It will better them as programmers and get them more familiar with the syntax of c++. Programmers should try to learn new things not stick to one language forever. VB is great as a simple and quick language that will always have a useful place.

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