"Edit and Continue" and programmers who work for a living.

Rory Blyth pointed me to DonXML's recent post on edit and continue functionality encouraging poor programming practices.  It's an interesting post for discussion, but I don't agree.  For many VB guys, edit and continue is a feature on par in usefulness with something like Intellisense.  It's a time-saver more than anything else.  Many solution programmers don't have time to debate the various algorithm efficiencies or write test harnesses for each component they create.  Many times, these guys are the ones writing test harnesses for your own code.  They want something that works yesterday.  If they're stepping through some new code to get it working, they don't want to rebuild for stupid mistakes that are not caught by the compiler.  IMO, they should bring edit and continue in for C# as well.

Comments

• Anonymous
  July 31, 2003
  Rory's blog rocks.
  
  As for my post, I understand what you are saying, but as someone who lives in the trenches (I'm a consultant, so I do development work for a living), I've found that I produce much cleaner code with less bugs if I take a couple minutes to design before I start coding. And I'm also the one who creates the test harnesses, which usually helps me get my debugging times down, so that when there is a bug (and there always will be one), I can isolate the section of code quickly and easily. It's a process that I've gotten use to, and at least in my case, reduces the time needed to code a system. Plus it help me create componenets and frameworks for other projects, which reduces the time needed to code them.
  
  DonXML
• Anonymous
  July 31, 2003
  Even with all the design in the world, developers sometimes make small silly typos that aren't caught by the compiler nor by glancing over the code before pressing build, and this is where edit & continue is useful...in any language.