Visual Studio 2005 + PUM == danger

We’re busy doing a bunch of prototyping on my double-super-secret project at work and I decide I need to chip in and help. I haven’t used Visual Studio 2005 (Whidbey) yet, so I figure I’d build a little app we need using it.

I sat down Wednesday night and started hammering away…

Not a complex app, basically a single winform app with about 30 controls used to create configuration files that another component the team is building can read. It can load and save the relevant data to XML files using the XmlSerializer classes. I do my typical anal stuff and make sure all the controls are perfectly lined up, tab order is correct, you get a “File not saved, wanna save” message when you try to exit if you didn’t save, the XML schema is clean, etc… Details. Details. Does it’s job, looks professional, and most amazingly only took me about 4 hours.

VS2005 simply rocks. I thought VS2004 and the .Net Framework with C# made coding easy, but VS2005 is just over the top. New little details like the FormClosing event on Form, the dialog layout hints that help you align controls, the date picker control, refactoring, made me look good. Even though it’s a beta it was rock solid for me (only the help felt like it wasn’t done).

In the morning I showed my work to my devs. Their response? “It’s pretty scary when your PUM [1] writes code.” When we showed the demo to my VP he said “You guys need a UI designer.” Ouch. He liked looking at the XML better. Oh well.

[1] At Microsoft a PUM == Product Unit Manager; manages a large technology or a atomic product. Dev, test, pm, etc… report to the PUM.

1 comment


  1. Steve Butler says:

    Put the weapon er. mouse down – step away from the keyboard 😉

    Just when I thought I’d climbed far enough up the ladder after VBA & Scripting let *any* Office user become a power developer. I guess the last redoubt will be MASM until IL becomes *the* micro code.

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