A while back I listened to Scott Hanselman’s podcast with Noah Richards about the new Visual Studio 2010 editor. It is a from scratch rewrite using WPF technologies. Noah mentioned that Microsoft will provide many hooks to the editor (via MEF), to make extensibility a snap. The overall message was that culture at Microsoft is slowly changing and that Microsoft is becoming more open (Noah’s apparently being called an “open source communist” by some old-timers).

I am a die hard fan of an open sorce Java editor (yes, Java!) called jEdit. It has many many features, but I love it for its block editing. I often find myself switching from Visual Studio to jEdit to massage my code. I decided to send some comments and suggestions to the VS editor team. I made two simple videos comparing block editing of VS and jEdit and forwarded them to Noah and his product managers. They were interested, but asked me to provide some use cases. This is what I came up with.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KPUr-Na9s3c

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cs0ptM1Rac8

Today I searched the blogsphere and what do you know. It seems that Microsoft really did incorporate my feedback. Check out the video Brittany Behrens posted. Looks like she covered all my use cases (fortunately she changed the “dump” method name to a more pc “print”). Noah also blogged about the new features.

You can only imagine how pleasantly surprised I was to see that Microsoft is actually serious about taking feedback from the community. This definitively makes me want to contribute more. And I am that much more excited to give Visual Studio 2010 Beta2 a spin =)

Edit: ScottGu mentiones the box selection in his blog post. It made the VS2010 RTM.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qp2WuJ2rEE4