What is the most important feature of Unify's Team Developer? Native database access or 4GL capabilities together with visual inheritance?
My personal favorite is the outline. I fell in love with this concept right from the beginning: all code available in a large tree that is easy to navigate.
It was a great invention and even today most integrated development environments (IDE) are missing this concept.
Visual Studio.NET is among the most advanced development tools and it took over some of the features that the SQLWindows outline have:
1) Solution Explorer
The solution explorer is organized like an outline and shows the top level items within a project (or a group of projects).
It is helpful to click around various files but I cannot get down to details and explore the content of a form window, for example.
2) Class View
Another view that is available as a docking window among the many options in Visual Studio is the class view.
It contains the full list of classes in a project. When I click on a class, its top-level items such as functions and variables are shown in a split window.
This is helpful, but not really what I am after. The class view is not a full tree, nor is it sorted in the way I have my code structured.
3) Regions
A cool new feature that came with Visual Studio are regions. They help me segment code in different chunks by using the #region and #endregion keywords. Whereever these two are used, the code will be expandable.
All three concepts in Visual Studio represent parts of the functionality that the outline in SQLWindows provides. But we are not yet there.
While browsing around the other day, I stumbled across one of the sites that host many add-on tools for Visual Studio. If you haven't seen them, there is a ton of such out there! Compared to the small add-on market place that I was used to in the old Gupta days (including IntelliSal and IntelliSearch from Ice Tea Group), the .NET world is a completely different story.
I found cool free add-on from Microsoft, called the Source Outliner:
This add-on comes from Microsoft as a binary for Visual Studio 2005 or 2008 and the full source code is available! It takes a file and shows the entire code content in a nice tree view. Things are not sorted alphabetically nor is it missing important stuff, it is simply a nice list of things contained in the file and helps to navigate around quickly.
It is not a full identical replacement, but this is coming very close to what I have been missing in the .NET world. A cool enhancement would be to show the regions in this tree as well. With the source code available, I am sure this won't take long until it is available...
The installer (and source code if you are interested) are available at CodePlex, Microsoft's open source community.
Here is the link along with further documentation and additional screenshots:
http://www.codeplex.com/SourceCodeOutliner