This is all like deja-vu all over again with the exception that this time around I'm using the editor full time.
That's not to say we've been totally enamored of each other for the last 24 hours, but we've made up and met half-way...
The fix-ups
Let me talk about the problems and workarounds first.
When I said yesterday that my macros compiled, that was true... every one of them... and that was a huge improvement because last go-around I had to dork around with most of them.
I may have also said they ran. Well, some of them ran.
As it works out, the macro-rendering still gets confused with the awesome template editing. I'm willing to bang around on the macros to make them work as long as there's a path to get there, and I've done so.
To keep from boring anyone I'll just stop by saying I have a workaround. I can't record a complex macro and then run it in the general case, but I know how to make it runable. It would be really nice if I could suspend the template editing while the macro runs though.
If there's anyone other than me that's out there building complex code-manipulating macros let me know and I'll put an article on WynApse.com to cover it.
The good stuff
Since all I've talked about are issues, I thought I'd talk about some of the things that I think are very cool, particularly compared to V7.
The File Open is/can be a slide-out like the Visual Studio toolbars, and works very cool on short-circuit typing to get you to where you want to be. It also remembers where you were. Since I'm not used to it yet, I still hit the Alt-E file open command and get a choice of ways to open a file which is great as well.
The output window and search results are in a tab control that is docked at the bottom much like VS which works nicely since you can have them collapse. Along the bottom are also tabs of all the open files and modified ones are in titled in red.
I was getting intellisense on C# and .NET things out of the box. It's not an exact science because even if I'm not 'using' system.Text, it still knows all about StringBuilder. But I can refactor that in VS when I get there.
At first I wasn't getting intellisense on my own code (outside the module I was editing) and figured there was a way to do it. I finally did Project->Open other Workspace, picked a Visual Studio .NET solution and pointed it at the .sln file for this beast and it built out the tags for the entire solution, subprojects as well. So now, if I type XYZdb. it will pop up with all the methods in that database DLL that has all the code hooking me up to Oracle.
OK so why?
If you've read this far and you're not a SlickEdit user, you're probably getting ready to ask me why would I want to use another editor if VS has one, so I'll try to list a few of the things that jump out at me quickly:
1) Two tools open... can be editing all over the place in SlickEdit and VS is still sitting there waiting patiently for me
2) When you do a search in VS, even on this dual quad-core beast, it seems to go for a smoke or something before getting it's act together. With SlickEdit, I can search up or down in this file NOW, I can search in the entire file structure, or across the hard disk or network. I can find/replace the same and it's FAST.
3) I can have snippets of code that I use over again setup on a button that I just push and there it is. Or I can have a macro that operates on the code in the editor window itself. And yes I know about VS code snippets :)
4) Using one editor, I can edit my code and then when a customer brings me a Word doc that has a list of workorders that she wants compared to a table in the database -- I can ASCII print the doc and quickly run a finger-macro to produce the file I need to compare.
5) I've got a bunch of macros that begin with me marking a block of lines and then they all become commented, put in a region, bulleted, numbered, indented, just to name a few things.
On to another 24 hours
I'm committed now (well, maybe I should have been long ago... but that's beside the point) ... I've switched to SlickEdit 2009 as my primary editor so if something isn't working, I'm going to make it so.
That's another very cool thing is since it's all about macros, if you don't like the way it works, do your own... copy from theirs, or call theirs and post-process.
I probably won't do an every 24-hour thing, but I'll report back again.