[Gambas-user] About Visual Studio Express

[jm]

On Wed, 2012-03-28 at 15:40 +0300, Demosthenes Koptsis wrote:
> These days i started to test Visual Studio Express 2010 to compare it 
> with Gambas3.
> 
> Does anyone have any experience with VB Studio Express ?
> 
> Are there any characteristics that may be we wanted to see in Gambas3 ?
> 
> Thank you !

I don't do VB, but here is one feature I would sorely appreciate.

[This may be too much to ask.]

I do 'frenzied' amounts of Gambas programming when on a roll, and keep
hitting one brick wall often.

The most common problem is knowing what objects are what and their
properties and methods in an easy way that doesn't interfere with
'frenzied' programming and debugging flow.

Take something like the object "Application.Path" which you might find
in code.

When I double click Application, it highlights that part of the text.
When I then right click, I get a pop up menu to insert a break point,
cut, paste, copy, etc. All nice. What I also want is an "info" menu
option added to the pop up menu.

The info menu will open a sub menu with first item titled help.
If I click help, it launches a web browser of choice and a html file
that documents that object.
The remaining items in the sub menu is all the properties and methods of
"Application" object can be set to, and if I click on any of those I get
help on each of those sub properties.

If I highlight the "Path" in "Application.Path", and then right click,
the info menu should change context to pull out help files
relating to Path.

The closest I can get to at the moment is to type "Application."
and as soon I enter the "." a pop up displays all the properties and
methods which allows one to guess the parameters of "Application"
and effectively in an indirect way obtain limited help on "Application"
object.

The same scheme of info menu can be extended for all the other objects
such as TextBox1.Text etc. The info menu will discover the object type
that has been selected and populate the sub menus with all the
correct values so that help can be obtained instantly on any object
and property or method.

In my opinion it will help a lot with rapid programming and debugging
flow.

#### aside ###

As an aside, HTML documentation is becoming a lot easier to manage.
If the HTML file is opened with konqueror, then install kompiz as well
for editing the HTML file. After installing kompiz, right clicking a
document in konqueror brings up a menu with option
"Open With >". Clicking that opens a sub menu that lists kompiz. Click
on the kompiz and hey presto, the HTML file is now opened for WYSIWYG
editing!

The edited files can be saved. So the next time you press for HTML based
help through the info method, you got the most up to date help file that
you personally updated with code fragments and helpful notes.
Developers can contribute their personal help files back to the project.

It would be good to offer the option to keep a duplicate copy of html
directory as a personal html directory that does not get over written
when new versions of gambas are installed.


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