by Don Burnett
Okay I sat down and started playing with Visual Studio Express 2008 sku's today. In general I am very impressed by the additions to the functionality.. But there is ONE simple thing that has annoyed me from even the last version of Visual Studio, that's of it's XML support and the consistency across products etc.. Now granted I am a designer/developer type. Which means I am more about design than I am development, but as a designer I have to occasionally dig into Visual Studio..
I have blogged about this before, but I don't think anyone read it..
Let's take a look here at a nice feature in Microsoft's own Expression Blend Product..
When you add an XML datasource, it will nicely handle just about any web service including a SIMPLE RSS data feed...
Meanwhile over in Visual Studio land with their designer, I still have to go in through code and parse the XML DATA... Or if I tried to add this as a web service or make a service reference, I get this..
Or using the XML datasource control with a URL (you can't without going to code).. (the URL typed into the data field below does not work)
It seems you still can't read in simply an RSS feed without code.. Now I admit I use blend more than I do Visual Studio, but honestly the Visual Studio team should be considering these kinds or things for consistency across the board. I know if I were a beginning developer and didn't know how to do this in code, I'd be in Blend almost immediately.. Simply put I think this is another misgiving that I have about Visual Studio and the Visual Studio development team at Microsoft. They seem to be ignoring how easy it is to do this kind of thing in even their other tools..
I think it would do the Visual Studio team some good to start talking with the Expression Blend team and making some of the tools they have in later Visual Studio versions a bit easier instead of ignoring the obvious. Things that would help people new to the Visual Studio IDE keeps getting ignored, even though they have added MANY new features and simplified development greatly..
I ask you your opinion, if you were working with XML data alone like an RSS Feed wouldn't you rather be doing this in BLEND? Come on, Visual Studio team you are ignoring some very obvious things that you could be improving how Visual Studio works, if you'd just be looking at how other products work even in your own organization..
I am preaching unification here because Visual Studio still doesn't seem to be seeing the improvements that I am personally hoping for. Come on guys, simple additions like adding URL support to Visual Studio 2008's XML data source would have been a really smart move.. Meanwhile I am glad we have Blend! It's not always about bloatware, it's rethinking what you have already got to make it better..
For those curious about using RSS with Visual Studio, there is an RSS screen saver code example (apparantly Windows APIs can read RSS they just didn't consider improving this functionality in Visual Studio itself.. But nevertheless, if you want to learn the Windows RSS API I suggest you look at this RSS screen saver example from the Coding4Fun dashboard application which you can download alongside the new Visual Studio Express editions or the C4F website itself.. Oh and that sound recorder Application that is below in the picture below the RSS example, doesn't work with the X64 edition, the program keeps coming back saying not a valid Win32 Application when you select "run app".. Yet another annoyance of mine, another team not writing for full 64-bit windows transparency.. There must have been an obvious hurry to get this stuff out..
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