Sasha Sydoruk

I see this debate coming up all the time. People will spend a lot of time arguing benefits of certain tools and languages instead of actually working on the project. Did I say people? I meant me. I spent huge amount of time trying to decide whether to write a web site in Ruby On Rails or ASP.NET that it is not even funny any more.The outcome?

Finally, I decided on ASP.NET 2.0; but I did waste a couple of months going back and forth between two environments. The good thing the project was my own pet project so the delay this big was not a problem.

The article also highlights the language choices for Copilot - C#, ASP.NET and C++ for Windows Client. But what is even more interesting is the development environment for FogBugz - Wasabi.

“FogBugz is written in Wasabi, a very advanced, functional-programming dialect of Basic with closures and lambdas and Rails-like active records that can be compiled down to VBScript, JavaScript, PHP4 or PHP5. Wasabi is a private, in-house language written by one of our best developers that is optimized specifically for developing FogBugz; the Wasabi compiler itself is written in C#.”

I think Joel mentioned this before.

Anyways, the article is really great, just like everything else from Joel. You might not agree with everything Joel preaches, but he definitely makes you think twice about the things you always took for granted. Go read the article - Joel on Software

As Kevin C mentioned in my comments, there is a way to enable Intellisense for skin files in Visual Studio 2005. This is a great comment and deserves to become a post:

Vladimir Bychkov shows us how to enable Intellisense for skin files in Visual Studio 2005.

One of the really nice features in Visual Studio 2005 is the IntelliSense support in xml files including web.config. No longer do you have to copy some snippets from other web sites just because you don’t quite remember the exact spelling of something like this:

        < membership>
< providers>
< add name=“AspNetSqlMembershipProvider“ type=“System.Web.Security.SqlMembershipProvider,                         System.Web, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a”
connectionStringName=“LocalSqlServer”
enablePasswordRetrieval=“false”
enablePasswordReset=“true”
requiresQuestionAndAnswer=“true”
applicationName=“/”
requiresUniqueEmail=“false”
passwordFormat=“Hashed”
maxInvalidPasswordAttempts=“5”
minRequiredPasswordLength=“7”
minRequiredNonalphanumericCharacters=“1”
passwordAttemptWindow=“10”
passwordStrengthRegularExpression=“” />
providers>
membership>
But from time to time you will notice that IntelliSense in web.config disappears. It just does not work anymore. You restart Visual Studio, reload the solution but it still does not work.

What is the problem? What caused this? Web Site Administration Tool is the culprit. WSAT is a great tool and allows to jumpstart the application but when the changes to web.config are saved, the following change is made:
< configuration>

Will be changed to this:
< configuration xmlns=“http://schemas.microsoft.com/.NetConfiguration/v2.0“>

Once the namespace information has been added to the configuration tag, the IntelliSense no longer works. The only way to make it work is to remove xmlns attribute.

Nice. Right when I am getting ready to move up to Visual Studio 2005, they release a service pack for Visual Studio 2003.