Whidbey Community Technology Preview – Part I

Finally got it installed, so am going to go over some things I notice and like/dislike.

Firstly, I didn’t get to have a look at the PDC version of Whidbey, so I don’t know what differences there will be between that and this.

Secondly – its a pre-beta version, or alpha, so I don’t expect everything to be all lovely.

Thirdly – I’m running it under Virtual PC so I’m not going to comment on performance, as its slow to start with.

Initial Things I Like Which Are Nice

I love Master-Content pages – I’ve been waiting for this feature for SO long. Haven’t really given it a good going over yet but looks good so far.
Generics – yep, good to have, should make life simpler, even if I end up just using the built in generic lists for typed arrays.
Switching from Design to Source – the cursor FINALLY moves with you (i.e. wherever the cursor is in the design view, thats also where it is in the source view).

Things I Might Like

Web Page Resources – Looks good I have to say, there appears to be some automatic resource linking going on here with no code, using the meta:resourcekey attribute. Very good if it does what I think it does but can’t find any documentation on it. Seems to work though.

Things I Don’t Like

I’d REALLY like to be able to delete a html tag from the bar at the bottom of the design view, but I only appear able to select. If you are applying and then removing fonts etc this can leave you with lots of crappy elements all over the place which are a pain to get rid of.

More to come as and when.