Visual Studio Wish List: Item #0001 - Managing Project types, SDKs, Plug-ins
Tonight is my first entry in my new column, Visual Studio Wish List. Here is my scenario - I just set up a new machine to try out some CTPs for Windows Azure, Live Framework, SQL Data Services & .NET services. After signing up on a series of connect sites and entering some invite codes (Am I the only person who thought it was a little confusing to navigate the Microsoft connect sites?) I get the following instructions:
Not a huge deal, but annoying that I have to go download all that stuff. Plus all the stuff I needed for SL, Azure & SDS. Maybe like 200 clicks to download 20 things and keep clicking Next on some installers. Not hard, but annoying especially when all these products are from one company. What I'd love is to have some sort of feature manager in VS when I can click "Add Feature" and select "Live Framework Development" or "Silverlight Mobile" so I don't have to hunt for Silverlight Mobile SP1 CTP Tools for Visual Studio to make it work. Clicking that would go out to the appropriate sites and download the dependencies and install everything. Even better if when I startup VS it can alert me of updates like "Silverlight Mobile SP1 CTP December Preview Tools for Visual Studio is available, would you like to upgrade?" Done. So much easier to get up and running. Most of the project types could just be add-on features so I can enable Windows Mobile development if I need it rather than having to go through the VS install process again which with it's normal speed takes about 4hrs on a quad core 3.2ghz machine.
Eclipse has something very similar to this already - Here is an example of the flow at http://www.comeclipse.com/updatesite.html
Screenshot from Eclipse's update manger
Even a command line tool similar to mac ports would be a huge help. Like on my mac if I want to do something in Django, I can just "port install django" and I get all the stuff I need to start building an app and can easily update when new versions are released.
And of course allow 3rd parties to plug-in to a directory service so I can download new unit testing frameworks or whatever.