I've been doing a lot of coding lately. This has been a bit of a departure from my usual work as a technology evangelist or a development manager, but - as you might imagine - it has been quite a lot of fun! Having said this, the process of actually sitting down and coding for 12 hours a day over the past few months has left me wishing that Visual Studio .NET shipped with a handful of additional capabilities in the box.

Track Changes
If you've ever written a book - or even an article - you have probably encountered the "track changes" feature of Microsoft Word. By turning on change tracking, every modification that is made to a document is recorded and a history of changes is kept. This may sound a lot like source control and, in fact, it is.

There are two important differences. The first is that, whereas source control specializes in storing multiple historical versions of a given document at a central location where multiple developers can access them via a check-in/check-out process, change tracking in Microsoft Word doesn't do any of this. It just stores additional metadata in a single, local copy of a document.

The second difference - which is what I would like to see added to Visual Studio to work in conjunction with source control - is the way in which these historical changes are displayed. By looking at a document in Word that is under change control, I can instantly see (via annotations in the margin) who made changes to each bit of it, when they changed it, etc. Wouldn't it be great to be able to tell instantly by looking at a piece of code who added a certain line of it, and when? It would make it so much easier to figure out whose butt needed kicking when you see rank stupidity.

Automated File Use Request
In keeping with the topic of source control for a moment... we have been using Source Safe. There are quite a few of us on the team and we have not (because it never works out right) turned on multiple check-outs. This means that I have to e-mail people two or three times a day - every day - to ask them if I could please use their files. I'd like to be able to ask Visual Studio to do this for me, right off the dialog where it tells me that a given file is currently in use.

Remote Desktop for Two Monitors
If you have two monitors at the office, drag some of your windows (like Solution Explorer) onto your second monitor, and then try to Remote Desktop into your worksta-tion when you get home. You will discover that Remote Desktop only gives you access to your primary monitor and that it is very hard to get back the windows that are on your second monitor.

Mock Environment Generator/Automatic Expand-and-Collapse-All for Solution Explorer
I lump these two together at the end because I am aware of third-party solutions that do both of these things. I'm cheap, though - so I'd like it for free "in the box."

What tools would you like to see as a part of Visual Studio .NET? Let me know at derek@sys-con.com!