Tuesday, December 31, 2002

Refactoring vs. Visual Studio. It's been a longstanding peeve of mine that the Microsoft toolset has been generally better than the Java toolset. The MS stuff just seemed to perform better, have a more fluid UI, have great capability, and so forth. Recent tools have come a long way and I don't feel like a second-class citizen when I'm working in the Java world any more. The first of the "good" IDEs was JBuilder 4, and things have gotten a lot better since. The thing is, I have been playing a bit with Visual Studio for .NET. I think that the Java land has finally pulled ahead, with support for refactorings. I've been making a lot more use of them over the past couple of months. There's just nothing there in Visual Studio at this point in time. There may be some plugins for VS that do the refactorings; I don't know. So I'd say that at this time, the Java environments are some of the nicest and most advanced IDEs out there. Enjoy it while it lasts. Competition is a good thing. 3:01:21 PM