Now that Developer Express have made a version of Refactor! available for free for VB.NET 2005 (see my previous post), why should one consider to spend money for the professional edition of the product? Detailed information on this topic is still in the works, but here's the bottom line (quoting Richard Morris, the CTO of Developer Express):

The features of Refactor! Pro (R!pro) that are not in Refactor! (R!) include

• more languages (Visual Basic AND C#)
• more Visual Studio IDEs (VS2002, 2003, and 2005)
• the ability to tweak and configure refactor through the Options dialog
• extra Refactorings: 4 extra right now, but we plan more

Also R!Pro includes our Visual extensibility API - so you will be able to build custom refactorings using any .NET language. I am fully expecting to see VB developers building tools for their C# peers.

NB: A few of the extra refactorings (like "rename" and "safe rename") will be available free of charge in the Bonus Refactorings pack available to developers who register R! but we plan a whole bunch of extra refactorings between now and the release of VS 2005 and some will be for the Pro product only .

Personally I've been using Refactor! Professional for quite a while during the beta program and I'd really recommend having a look at it. The C# support, for one thing, is very good and competes easily with the builtin functionality of VS 2005.

I hope more information will be available soon, for now this page tells about the Refactor! Professional edition.

As astonishing as this problem was, I found a very easy fix for it, suggested in the Microsoft Product Feedback Center, if you can believe it. Apparently, a similar issue was already in the beta 1 refresh that came out many months ago, but was never actually solved. I tried to make my voice heard here, maybe it'll be fixed in the future.

Meanwhile, here's what needs to be done to get networking back: Uninstall (or don't install from the start) the "Microsoft Device Emulator version 1.0 Beta 2 - ENU" entry (BTW, anybody in this world know what ENU means? What's the use of acronyms such as this in my installed applications list? Wikipedia gives a 404 when I search for it...) from the Add or Remove Programs control panel. Networking will be back to normal instantly.

Interestingly, in my normal workstation I've used the device emulator in the past and it used to work just fine. No idea what's causing it to fail on the Tablet PC, and some of the other reports in the feedback center don't seem to be using Tablet PCs at all. Oh well :-)

Now I've finally had a look at the image library that comes with VS.NET 2005 beta 2. In a previous post I had commented on the video that Aaron had made about the library, and there seemed to be a number of varying views on the topic as well as on the final contents of the library.

So what's in it? Well, it's part light, part dark... The icons, at least those in Windows XP format (74 are included of those), have several different formats, ranging from 16x16 to 48x48 and from 256 colours to True Colour. The icons seem to have a good quality, although the range of images provided leaves a lot to be desired. There are also a few other icons (not in the Windows XP format) of lower quality. Together with the animations, which aren't new for the largest part but come in AVI as well as GIF versions, the icons form the "light" part of the image library.

On the other hand, the images are just as useless as I feared they would be. Most of them by far are of a kind that I can't imagine any use for in any consumer application, they seem to be directly ripped from the VS toolbox or some similar technical source. The other huge issue is that they come only in a 16x16 resolution. Different colour depths are partly provided, as well as variants with a magenta mask and without a mask.

So my conclusion is still: ridiculous. Anyone who's tried to improve a medium-size end user application with proper graphics knows that you need a very versatile collection of images to do that. Already today, 16x16 is an image size that's only just usable in a toolbar or a menu, with screen sizes increasing, this will be even much worse in a year's time. I could suggest Microsoft thinks we all write apps that need a huge number of icons with colourful bricks in a suitecase, but I rather continue suggesting that Microsoft thinks it's not their job to provide for nice graphics to use with their development tools.

You can find their original announcement here and this link at Microsoft tells you much more about Refactor! itself.

With the availability of new C# refactoring functionality in VS.NET 2005, Microsoft seem to have noticed the lack of similar functionality for Visual Basic developers. That's why a cooperation was struck up with Developer Express for them to offer their fantastic DXCore-based refactoring product in a free version to VB.NET 2005 developers.

There's lots of additional information on Refactor! available at the Developer Express website, also about the Professional version (which also works with C#, very recommended!) and the companion (parent?) product CodeRush for VS.NET. A white paper has been made available about Refactoring in Visual Basic .NET 2005 that's really worth a read.

The free download of Refactor! for VB.NET 2005 is available here: http://www.devexpress.com/vbrefactor

There are three ways to get support for this version of Refactor!. You can contact the Developer Express support directly at support@devexpress.com, the Visual Basic IDE Forum at Microsoft's is open to questions and suggestions at http://forums.microsoft.com/msdn/showforum.aspx?forumid=65 and finally Developer Express have opened a newsgroup called devexpress.public.dotnet.refactor.vb on their news server (you can find all the information you need to get connected to the news server at http://www.devexpress.com/Support/Newsgroups.xml.)