Announcing: C# Edit and Continue support for Visual Studio 2005

Article
10/15/2004

A few weeks ago, I updated my blog by writing about Microsoft’s commitment to VB.Net. This posting generated a healthy discussion between C# & VB developers with both camps championing their favorite features. A nice feature for our VB customers in Visual Studio 2005 (and also Visual C++) is ‘Edit & Continue’ (E&C). For those of you not familiar with E&C, E&C enables you to make changes to your code while an application is being debugged. Imagine that you are debugging a complex application. Suddenly, you see that you’ve made an error in your application. Sighing, you stop the application, make the correction and start the code-compile-debug cycle all over again. This means that you spend a lot of time recompiling the application even if you’ve changed only one line of code. E&C changes this and reduces the time required to fix bugs. In the above scenario, you could just fix the SQL query and continue debugging the application from the same point.

One of the top feedback requests from our customers is support for Edit & Continue (E&C) in C# in Visual Studio 2005. I am excited to announce that the C# team took your feedback to heart and has added support for E&C in Visual Studio 2005.

We have always maintained that you should program in the language you’re most comfortable with. If you like E&C but prefer programming in C#, Visual Studio 2005 will enable you to do just that. This is a great example of the large number of customer driven features in Visual Studio 2005. Adding E&C to Visual C# is currently one of the top requested customer suggestions on the MSDN Product Feedback Center. Visual C# 2005 in Whidbey has been significantly improved by adding innovative language constructs, new compiler features, dramatically enhanced developer productivity, and an improved debugging experience.

We will be putting out the next Community Technology Preview for Visual Studio 2005 next week. This will contain the C# E&C feature. Give it a whirl and let us know how you like this!

Check out this page to see the latest information on Visual Studio 2005 and for a link to the latest Community Technology Preview when we make this available next week.

Namaste!

Comments

Anonymous
October 15, 2004
Thanks!
Anonymous
October 15, 2004
Great news!
Thanks a lot and kudos to the C# team!
Anonymous
October 15, 2004
That is truly superb news. Thanks for the info.
Anonymous
October 15, 2004
<faint>

Sweet stuff! It always bugged me that VB was getting this, but not C#. You've made me (and I'm sure countless others) very happy.
Anonymous
October 15, 2004
Fantastic! Greatest news since VS 6!
Anonymous
October 15, 2004
This really wasn't a new request, though.

Those of us who started using VS.NET in the original betas were clamoring for it then, and we thought that it was surely going to be included in VS.NET 2003. It was one of those things that was just sort of expected from the new environment, and finding out that it wasn't there was almost a shock.

We simply didn't realize the impact of a new language on a feature that we had come to know and love from the VB development environment.
Anonymous
October 15, 2004
Excellent!
Anonymous
October 15, 2004
Will the next CTP be integrated with Team System?
Anonymous
October 15, 2004
Finally! C# becomes a "First-Class Citizen Language" just like VB! (snicker! snicker!)
Anonymous
October 15, 2004
That's great news - thanks!
Anonymous
October 15, 2004
Nice! Will it work with ASP.NET? I heard there is some limitations there. What's the story?
Anonymous
October 15, 2004
Our plan moving forward on VS2005 CTPs is to alternate between the Express editions and the Visual Studio Team System. So, for example this month's CTP will include the Express editions and the next CTP following that will have VSTS.
Anonymous
October 15, 2004
The C# team have made C# programmers everywhere happy! Thanks!
Anonymous
October 15, 2004
http://blogs.msdn.com/somasegar/archive/2004/10/15/242853.aspx I'm totally stoked about this... People have been asking for this since the 1.0 (VS 7.0). Kudos to the entire E&C team....
Anonymous
October 15, 2004
It's official: Edit and Continue will be in C# 2.0. Thank you!...
Anonymous
October 15, 2004
Cool, is the My namespace comming to c# too
Anonymous
October 15, 2004
No immediate plans for adding the My namespace to c#.
Anonymous
October 15, 2004
C# E&C = Productivity^2
Anonymous
October 15, 2004
Edit and Continue in C#
Anonymous
October 15, 2004
Edit and Continue in C#
Anonymous
October 15, 2004
Edit and Continue in C#
Anonymous
October 15, 2004
How stable is it going to be, so late in the release cycle?
Anonymous
October 15, 2004
The comment has been removed
Anonymous
October 15, 2004
More Of VB Style :)

http://www.WillyDev.Net
Anonymous
October 15, 2004
Thank you for your excellent feedback. Very excited to try it out. So are the VB guys getting refectoring? ;)
Anonymous
October 15, 2004
One of the best VB features in c# now - right on!
Anonymous
October 15, 2004
You have restored my faith in MSFT and it's commitment to developers and what they are asking for!
Anonymous
October 15, 2004
How about making the current debugger work correctly - then I'll faint with joy.
Anonymous
October 15, 2004
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you..... from a guy who had done VB6 for 7 years.
Anonymous
October 15, 2004
YAHOOOOOOOOO, thank you C# Team
Anonymous
October 15, 2004
Thanks! This will be very useful and cut down on development time!
Anonymous
October 15, 2004
Sounds cool. But is it availabel in the VS2005 Express edition ?
Anonymous
October 15, 2004
Will it also be available in the C# Express Edition, or only in VS2005?
Anonymous
October 15, 2004
So the release date will be delayed further?
Anonymous
October 15, 2004
Edit and continue for both C# and VB does not work for ASP.NET. There were two major reasons for this. The first and by far the most important reason is that the ASP.NET team felt that their current model was already incredibly iterative even without E&C and that trying to apply the same model that we use for client apps would actually be more restrictive. The reason is that the ASP.NET model is generally compile on the server. So in order to get updated changes, see new content, hit breakpoints on newly added code, you can just hit F5 on the page in IE to refresh. That hits the server and tells ASP.NET to recompile the changes. If we were to use an E&C model instead then the set of ‘rude edit’ restrictions would need to be in place, so it would suddenly become illegal to add new public methods.

The second reason was simply that it was technically difficult to do and even in the very early planning stages of E&C for Whidbey both VS and the CLR were trying to limit the scope such that we didn’t end up in the same position with E&C that we did for 2002.
Anonymous
October 15, 2004
The comment has been removed
Anonymous
October 16, 2004
Edit
Anonymous
October 16, 2004
Several people have asked me about whether Edit & Continue will be in the Express Edition of the product.

The answer is - absolutely yes!

This is true for E&C both for VB Express and C# Express in VS2005.

- somasegar
Anonymous
October 16, 2004
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you :-)

This will truly be a great time saver for those of us working on larger projects that take a long time to start up.
Anonymous
October 16, 2004
Trackback
Anonymous
October 16, 2004
S dot One heeft het over .NET » C# vs VB.Net : 1 - 0
Anonymous
October 17, 2004
VS 2005 - C# でもエディット＆コンティニューをサポート
Anonymous
October 17, 2004
Fantastic. I was really thinking about going back to VB.NET because of E&C (Yes, it is that important!). Now I can continue in my favorite language.
Anonymous
October 17, 2004
Soma, this is great news. Could you elaborate more on the "not works in ASP.NET" part ? I mean, like many of the folks out there, 80% of all the code I write in .Net is to be used ultimately in an ASP.NET application. Are you saying that I'll only be able to use E&C in .exe projects or .dlls being used in .exe projects ? Or something liek this? That would be a let down for me.
Anonymous
October 18, 2004
Ja, det er nok ike g
Anonymous
October 18, 2004
Be like Lance...
Anonymous
October 18, 2004
Thank you very much!
The idea of MS Feedback Center is really great, I think it will be a powerful instrument.
Anonymous
October 18, 2004
Cool News, now C# programmers will have time to wash their hair!
Anonymous
October 18, 2004
Well, Microsoft has got a big set of ears :-)
Anonymous
October 18, 2004
Just seen this one wander past, edit & continue is (finally) in C#.http://blogs.msdn.com/somasegar/archive/2004/10/15/242853.aspxI've always liked it in VB6 but it does awful things for your stability (unsurprising really). It's just so nice to have w
Anonymous
October 19, 2004
if
Anonymous
October 20, 2004
Very very good job!!!!
Anonymous
October 20, 2004
The comment has been removed
Anonymous
October 22, 2004
It's nice, but the most important thing is to put in massive refactoring and intelligent code generation features - above and beyond any E&C features.

And if you really want to get dirty, then the above for C++ is absolutely crudial nowadays...
Anonymous
October 24, 2004
Wonderful
Thanks Microsoft
Like it.
Anonymous
October 24, 2004
Thank you very much! E&C was my most missed feature for C# ever... :)
Anonymous
October 25, 2004
Edit and Continue for C# in VS 2005
Anonymous
October 25, 2004
Jak se dozvídám na http://blogs.msdn.com/somasegar/archive/2004/10/15/242853.aspx , v další Community Technology Preview verzi bude tato již dlouho požadovaná featura přidána. Visual Studio 2005 se tímto posouvá o další úroveň výše, mnohé díky směřují jeh
Anonymous
October 28, 2004
So, its been 2 weeks but I have not seen another communitey tech preview of VS 2005. Any news on when that will actually be coming?
Anonymous
October 28, 2004
You can get the latest Community Technology Preview for VS2005 (October drop) at
http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/vs2005/downloads/default.aspx.
Anonymous
October 28, 2004
Thanks for pointing me to the MSDN Product Feedback Center. That is exactly what I have been looking for. I will be making several suggestions over the next couple of months. There are so many opportunities for growth within Visual Studio .Net, hopefully by actively participating within the community Microsoft will listen and we can start to turn it into the powerful IDE that we all expect.
Anonymous
October 28, 2004
Looking forward to seeing your suggestions and input via MSDN Feedback Center. Together, we can absolutely build and deliver something that we all want.
Anonymous
October 28, 2004
This is very nice to hear. However, I understand ASP.NET does not support E&C. Which projects types do support it? I assume WinForms, but do console apps and class library projects support E&C?
Along these lines, if Winforms support E&C, could you drop the cassinni web server code (or something similar) in to a winform exe and thus get E&C to work for ASP.NET pages, under C# no less?
Anonymous
October 30, 2004
Sweettttt!!!
Anonymous
November 02, 2004
ff
Anonymous
November 04, 2004
The comment has been removed
Anonymous
November 05, 2004
Thanks for the follow-up. Regarding E&C for ASP - I think it boils down to the amount of time it takes to get back to business after a code change.
Not clicking Stop is very very nice indeed, but if this delay can be kept to a few seconds (< 5), and session and application state can be held, then I would guess you might not need E&C at all for ASP.NET. I did see a small delay in changing code under Web Developer Express in the code behind, but when I changed something in a separate DLL in the 'Code' folder, it took about 30 seconds. Hopefully that can improve under the final 2005 version.
Anonymous
November 10, 2004
This is great! Are there public changes in the compiler or assembly API to make E&C happen? E.g. I would assume that the same infrastructure you need for E&C would really help people to develop dynamic expression evaluators that can keep context.
Anonymous
December 18, 2004
Helpful For MBA Fans.
Anonymous
January 15, 2005
From Somasegars weblog:
Someone has finally taken to their senses and introduced edit and
continue...
Anonymous
February 04, 2006
PingBack from http://www.behemothit.com/?p=36
Anonymous
April 19, 2006
THANKS!
Anonymous
October 26, 2007
is der any1 hu cud help me to edit the value in a class after type a comand in a console application c#.........tnx
Anonymous
November 01, 2007
Off topic, but similar BTW, does anyone know how to use devStudio 2005 but with .net 1.1? I tried using MSBuild and MSBee, but this is still problematic.
Anonymous
November 15, 2007
PingBack from http://www.devslife.com/2004/11/11/edit-and-continue-in-c/
Anonymous
November 18, 2007
PingBack from http://www.devslife.com/?p=1233
Anonymous
January 04, 2008
Hello everybody I am using c#. I want to know to programatically change my C# code in order to get it compiled by distcc. does any body know how to use distcc with c# sample program ? or maybe how to change the compiler in C# and use the distcc instead. please help.
Anonymous
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PingBack from http://websitescripts.247blogging.info/somasegars-weblog-announcing-c-edit-and-continue-support-for/
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PingBack from http://softwareinformation.247blogging.info/somasegars-weblog-announcing-c-edit-and-continue-support-for/
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PingBack from http://softwareinformation.247blogging.info/somasegars-weblog-announcing-c-edit-and-continue-support-for/
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January 26, 2008
PingBack from http://softwareinformation.247blogging.info/marklon-what-sort-of-support-cases-are-we-seeing-with-whidbey/
Anonymous
June 04, 2008
One goal of this site is to provide customers with insight into how we build software.
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