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by Paul Vick.
Original Post: Zero-impact projects rock!
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OK, I'll admit it - there are actually times when I think features that we're introducing are stupid. (Of course, they're always someone else's features, never my own...) One such example was the reappearance of something we call “zero-impact projects.” A zero-impact project is a project that is created on-the-fly in a temporary directory rather than being saved somewhere permanent like your Projects directory. You don't have to create something permanent until you do something like shut down the IDE or close the project. VB6 did this, but VB7 didn't, and I personally never thought much about it. When I found out we were doing the work to restore it, I though, “Ah, that's dumb. Who really cares about this? All it does is save you having to pick a place for your project... Grumble, grumble.”
Well, let me publicly eat my words: munch, munch, munch. I've switched to VB 2005 Beta 1 full time for the stuff that I'm working on and zero-impact projects absolutely rock! One of the things I'm doing right now is updating the language specification for VB 2005 and it's just great to be able to bring up VS, create a VB project, play around for a little while and then close down VS without having anything left behind on my computer. No more “ConsoleApplication491349” projects! I mean, I was right in one way - it's a little thing, but, boy, it does make a difference. (The faster startup time of the IDE also helps immensely.)
If you aren't using the VB profile, you can enable zero-impact install by clicking on the “Projects and Solutions” entry in the Tools | Options dialog and unchecking “Save new projects when created.” It'll even work for C# projects! (Although this feature might be a little too “edit and continue”y for those C# folks... <g>)
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