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What's my beef with productivity tools? It's much deeper than a dislike for any particular tool. Charles Petzold already described his concern about Visual Studio in 2005 in a great talk titled Does Visual Studio Rot the Mind?. It's a long read, but definitely worth your while. You should go read it now. In case you didn't want to take the time to read that article (but then: you're already reading this lengthy article), here's the gist of it: Via IntelliSense, code generation, Wizards and drag and drop, Visual Studio assists us, but it also pushes us towards writing (or not writing) code in a particular way. It railroads us. Does it make us more productive? I don't even know how to measure developer productivity, so I can't answer that. Do we learn while coding like that? Not much, I'd say. Intellisense: good or evil? Discuss among yourselves...
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Yes, a good discussion. I find it does. Why? First, intellisense helps prompt or discover new methods. It also helps me to remember method names. I guess age and mind rott are to blame.
Secondly, re-sharper, fxcop, style cop etc are all great in my mind. Again, it helps "standardise" code and teaches you to adhere to a code practice. It again helps to prompt and question what you are doing in the first place.
It can help with productivity.
However, I do understand where Mark is coming from. In the old days, you had to "know" about what you are doing as there was little information, books etc. however, I bet the learning curve was longer.
Either that or I am just STUPID!
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Not to mention, thinkgs like FXCop, JSLint, etc. can highlight things you're doing wrong. Personally, when it marks something as being a problem I look up why, then adjust my style to fix the problem both now and in the future. My future code becomes better as a result even without the tools.
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