Being more productive

Last Tuesday I gave an internal presentation at Compuware about how to be more productive with the .NET Framework and the Visual Studio IDE. I gathered enough tips & tricks for a two hour presentation and it was fun to do because all stuff could be demoed in Visual Studio. I deliberately paid more attention to tips & tricks that can be used with Visual Studio 2003 and the .NET Framework 1.1. From beta 1 of Visual Studio 2005 until the full release in November 2005, a hype has been created that Visual Studio 2005 and the .NET Framework 2.0 would be far more productive for developers. That may be the case, but we must not forget that a lot of us will still be developing software for several months (hopefully not years) with Visual Studio 2003 and the .NET Framework 1.1. The evening of the presentation it was shown that still a lot of features in the .NET Framework 1.1 are not fully adopted and there's still some room for improvement about how we write code in the old environment. In some next posts I'll try to cover some stuff I talked about.