Wiring up the innards

Posted on March 9th, 2004 by Jeff

Writing code’s not that hard. Getting it work correctly isn’t that hard either. What makes things difficult and lowers productivity is change. Visual Studio.NET, as you are probably well aware, is quite a different beast than VS 6.0. Features that we took for granted before, such as ClassWizard, are now gone or integrated into the environment in such a way as to be invisible.

I was never a big fan of the ClassWizard with all it’s problems but it did a decent job of updating all the boilerplate code necessitated by ATL, MFC, and COM programming. It was useful to get a quick overview of how a new feature worked… and now it’s gone. I’ve been away from MFC and COM for two years now — I’m currently doing service layer work — and I’ve found that the vernacular has changed. What is an assembly anyway? Last I knew, assembly was a low-level programming language close to the metal…so now not only do I have to learn new jargon, but I have to relearn the environment.

I don’t really mind, but it does slow things down.

Today’s stupid code trick was figuring out how to catch the events. I’m now handling some of the build events and will hack up the WindowEvents listener later tonight. It’s just another thing the v6.0 addin code wizard did for you that the new one doesn’t.

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