Comments and Suggestions

[Atavis]

Hi,

I started having a play around with RiS the other day and I was quite impressed as to how well integrated you have got it into VS.NET. Unfortunately there are a few areas that are bugging me enough to make me hold off from buying it at the moment. I've compiled a list of things that I think would be nice additions to RiS and would like to hear what you think.

General

• Does RiS support Rails 2.0 fully? Default for views are now .html.erb but the default in when adding view templates is still .rhtml. Could this be an option somewhere to choose between .rhtml and .html.erb? Or maybe derive this from the project environment.rb file and rails version? From what I've seen so far, everything already works with Rails 2.0, but I have not done an extensive search yet.

Project List

• Can the project tree be organised in a beter way, similar to netbeans? (http://www.digitalhorizons.co.uk/images/ris/project.png)
• Move migrations into its own docking window / tab next to the project tab so you just have a list of migrations available easily.
• Remove (hide) files and folders like RAKEFILE, script, log, tmp, vendor as they are not really needed as part of the project tree. Logs could have a dedicated log viewer somewhere. You could also then use the "show all" button at the top to show the full tree as it looks on the filesystem.
• Use different icons to differentiate the importsnt folders (Controllers, Views, Models, etc) like ASP.NET projects have for App_Code, App_Themes and Bin etc.
• Change the project icon for the rails icon instead of a picture of a window ( yes, I know im being picky )

Generators

• At the moment you have to click the generator button then enter the details in the dock window. Could you create a file template so that you can Right click a project, goto Add > New Item then choose the Controller item or Model etc which runs the generator from there based on the name you give it (it would have to use the default generator options and you could keep the generator dialog for more advanced use like when you need to force, skip etc) I think this would be more natural, epecially for those who use VS.NET already.
• Could there be a context menu item for destroy on the files in the project view which runs the "destroy" generator on the file selected rather than just delete.

Intellisense

• Is it missing intellisense for certain things, e.g. the request and response objects? Netbeans seems to have these, see screenshot for example. (http://www.digitalhorizons.co.uk/images/ris/intellisense.png)
• Fields on models - Would it be possible to extend the intellisense for models so that you can see the field names and also the related model/object hierarchy. You could maybe tie this into migrations and parse the migration files in order to quickly extract the info instead of having to connect to the database and get it which may be easier than trying to support every database.

Debugger

• One thing I noticed when debugging was that if there is an error in my code it will step down into the base Rails code and allow you to debug that. I dont really care about the rails code as you would assume that it works. Is there an option to stop the debugger going so far down (ie do not debug files that are not in the project tree)?  There could be cases when you want to go that deep to make sure rails is actually doing the right thing, but 9/10 I would say you only want to debug your own code.

I've done a bit of work on writing VS.NET extensions before myself so I tried to stay to things that I thought would be possible to implement relatively easily. I would like to hear what your oppinions are though.


David

[Huw Collingbourne]

Thanks for the comments.

Does RiS support Rails 2.0 fully? Default for views are now .html.erb but the default in when adding view templates is still .rhtml. Could this be an option somewhere to choose between .rhtml and .html.erb? Or maybe derive this from the project environment.rb file and rails version? From what I've seen so far, everything already works with Rails 2.0, but I have not done an extensive search yet.

The next update will give you the choice of erb/rhtml extensions when adding new items. That said, our support for Rails 2.0 will not be as complete as for rails 1.2 until later in the year. In particular, some features of our forthcoming visual designer will initially be specific to Rails 1.x with Rails 2.x to follow shortly thereafter.

Can the project tree be organised in a beter way, similar to netbeans?

Can you explain what you prefer about that tree? Our users have requested in the past that we represent the actual structure of the Rails folders on disk as closely as possible and that is the strategy which we have adopted.

Move migrations into its own docking window / tab next to the project tab so you just have a list of migrations available easily.

Sounds like a good idea. I’ll make a note of that.

Remove (hide) files and folders like RAKEFILE, script, log, tmp, vendor as they are not really needed as part of the project tree.

Do this by selecting Project->Properties Find the Synchronization group. here you can exclude hidden files and folders, files with specific extensions or files with no extensions. the synchronize button is on the Ruby menu or above the Solution Explorer.

Logs could have a dedicated log viewer somewhere.

That’s on our list of things to be added.

You could also then use the "show all" button at the top to show the full tree as it looks on the filesystem.

That’s there now.

Use different icons to differentiate the importsnt folders (Controllers, Views, Models, etc) like ASP.NET projects have for App_Code, App_Themes and Bin etc.

I hadn’t thought of that. We’ll consider this.

Change the project icon for the rails icon instead of a picture of a window ( yes, I know im being picky )

Fair enough ;-)
 

At the moment you have to click the generator button then enter the details in the dock window. Could you create a file template so that you can Right click a project, goto Add > New Item then choose the Controller item or Model etc which runs the generator from there based on the name you give it (it would have to use the default generator options and you could keep the generator dialog for more advanced use like when you need to force, skip etc) I think this would be more natural, epecially for those who use VS.NET already.

We have a number of Wizards scheduled for release 1.5 later in the year. This sounds like a candidate...

Could there be a context menu item for destroy on the files in the project view which runs the "destroy" generator on the file selected rather than just delete.

Do you mean instead of running Destroy from the Generator toolwindow? I’m reluctant to add too many Rails specific features into the Solution Explorer itself as many of our customers don’t use Rails. For that reason, we generally prefer Rails tools to be separated out into their own tool windows.

Is it missing intellisense for certain things, e.g. the request and response objects? Netbeans seems to have these, see screenshot for example.

Currently all our IntelliSense is analytical (we interpret the actual code in order to derive information). It is my understanding that NetBeans uses heuristics (it looks up lists of methods based on pre-defined ‘rules’). This means that our IntelliSense is very accurate when type information can be inferred but there are some cases - particularly in rails - when type information cannot be inferred at design time. We will be adding extra features to the IntelliSense system to deal with these conditions later in the year.

Fields on models - Would it be possible to extend the intellisense for models so that you can see the field names and also the related model/object hierarchy. You could maybe tie this into migrations and parse the migration files in order to quickly extract the info instead of having to connect to the database and get it which may be easier than trying to support every database.

’Database IntelliSense’ is on our RoadMap for later in the year: http://www.sapphiresteel.com/Ruby-In-Steel-Road-Map

One thing I noticed when debugging was that if there is an error in my code it will step down into the base Rails code and allow you to debug that. I dont really care about the rails code as you would assume that it works. Is there an option to stop the debugger going so far down (ie do not debug files that are not in the project tree)?  There could be cases when you want to go that deep to make sure rails is actually doing the right thing, but 9/10 I would say you only want to debug your own code.

You could step-over or step-out instead of step into. That will avoid going deeper than you need.

best wishes

Huw