how about proper 3d uml class diagrams? If I could extend diagrams into a third dimension I could finally draw them without any of the lines crossing. I like the idea of moving the viewpoint around in 3d to see the structure from different angles, too.

I try to follow the rule "Never catch an exception you can't handle" although I do have catch blocks that add context and rethrow. When an unhandleable exception reaches the user, apologise, generate a report (crash dump, log file etc), and exit cleanly. What else could you do?

it's a common occurrence for all the developers where I work I think it's TFS (and before that, VSS) integration that does it I've tried installing various hotfixes from ms, and they don't help

someone should tell microsoft how to fix this - I'm sick and tired of having visual studio (2005 and 2008) open a modal dialog behind the main window, and not let me bring it to the front because the main window has lost focus and is refusing to budge. Anyone else grown to hate that 'donk' sound it makes when you click on it and nothing happens? The only way out is to press escape, but that doesn't always work either; then the only thing to do is kill it in process explorer. Task manager can't do it, it's too polite, and vs says 'can't close because it's waiting for input'. Does it still do that in VS2010? I'm hoping that with the switch to WPF, the entire gui will have been overhauled too.

right click on a project in the solution, add, new item, class diagram.

I think you need VS2005 or earlier, and "visio 2003 for enterprise architects" They took out the reverse engineering from visio 2007 entirely, on the basis that the integrated diagramming tools of VS2008 could be used instead. In fact the reverse engineering and diagramming in vs2008 is pants for c++ programming; objects can get lost and never come back, and if you change the code and look at the diagram again it can just flatly refuse to open, forcing you to redraw it from scratch or edit the diagram's xml until it will open again. Looks like we'll all be drawing diagrams by hand until vs2010 team system rosario[^] comes out.

I guess I just want the default implementation of Dispose() to call Dispose() on all the member variables.

I'd like to see member variables treated as if they were in a class-lifetime 'using' statement. I miss the deterministic destructor from c++, but this would at least allow me to put the class in a using statement and have its member variables' dispose methods called implicitly.

maybe another advantage is that loads of defaulted parameters would slow a simple call down, but using overloaded functions it would not have to push all those unused parameters onto the stack, so it would go faster.

Leslie Sanford wrote:

You want to limit the usage of const parameters to minimize side-effects.

Shouldn't it be "You want to use the limit of const parameters to minimize side-effects"? :)

hear, hear! I had heard that proper run-time const support in the clr was far too hard or expensive, and providing a weak const keyword in c# (like c++ has got) without properly enforcing it in the clr would just be misleading. Shame though; I would have liked proper const guarantees in the clr.

ahhh - thank you - I've been looking for this for years. It only works when connecting to vista or 2008 though, so I'm still stuck when remoting to xp (could this finally be a reason to upgrade my dev machine to vista?) Work would still have to upgrade their citrix servers to rdp 6, or allow a TS Gateway to accept connections through the corporate firewall, for it to be any use when remoting in to work. Oh well, I can always dream...

Hard to replicate two 19" monitors with RDP too :( (please someone tell me I'm wrong!)

I'm not impressed by that - I actually watched it count down to 00:00:00 (9am uk time) and now it just says "Times up!". Are they trying to sell anything at all?

but then you end up doing everything backwards and obfuscating the code. I'd rather have one if-statement a year go wrong than have to struggle to read every line of code every day of the year.