I have been using Visual Studio 2010 for a short while now ever since the prospect of developing workflows for Enterprise CRM became a reality. One thing that I noticed when working with The Raiser’s Edge API however is that it is much faster to type out everything.

In VB6 and VBA the Fields Enumerations were shorter. You did not have to enter the name of the enumeration as you do with .NET so for example I could write:

constit.Fields(RECORDS_fld_FIRST_NAME) = "David"

That would work fine.

In .NET I have to write it out in full.

constit.Fields(ERECORDSFields.RECORDS_fld_FIRST_NAME) = "David"

Now intellisense helps us with some of this and indeed you didn’t need to start typing “ERECORDFields” as it would be enough with RECORDS_fld_FIRST_NAME. This example is not so painful but I hated some fields as their length always added to the time it took to enter code. For example:

phone.Fields(ECONSTIT_ADDRESS_PHONEFields.CONSTIT_ADDRESS_PHONES_fld_PHONETYPE)

Here I would have to write an enormous amount of text before I even got to the field that I actually wanted (phone type)

However in VS2010 this has been improved considerably.

When I start typing the above I can simply type the following

phone.Fields(ty

And up pops my intellisense with only one alternative: ECONSTIT_ADDRESS_PHONEFields.CONSTIT_ADDRESS_PHONES_fld_PHONETYPE

Much easier!