I’m working with Visual Studio 2003 a lot for the past several months. As a UI designer myself there a lots of things I would add or change.
For one, the bar between the toolbar and main editor, which displays the filenames is nearly worthless and takes up a lot of space, at least one extra line. It’s cleverly useless though. It displays the filename and path you are looking and you can click left and right arrows to scroll to other files that are also open. Sounds great. Why is it useless? If you are editing anything with more than 3 or 4 files you have to use the left and right errors alot. It’s faster to use the huge Project Explorer Pane. I’m typically viewing and editing 30-50 files. So, not particularly useful.
A nice enhancement would be a window quick enlargement. The use case goes like this. I’m looking for something which is in one of many files. So, I search for it. Normally, this list should be very small so I seem much of the file editor and little of the list. But when I’m scanning across hundreds of found instances I want to see that as the big pane. Now, you have to resize the window. But a single click action on the Find Pane’s bar which double or tripled the vertical size would make this much easier. When I’ve double clicked one of the items in this pane, the pane should return to it’s original size, tiny.
By default the toolbars come with lots of junk that no one uses. This is a huge waste of space. The defaults need to be set narrower. What is the core usage of the IDE? It’s a text editor with the ability to run and debug the app. So features like un/commenting a block of code are great. But if you are using the indent buttons you need to go back to using Notepad (little clue Tab and Shift-Tab. Undo/Redo yes. Solution Explorer and Class View no. These are both big UI changes. Should you really be doing that every few minutes. Also, these buttons only open the class view, they don’t open/close it. For that you must use the standard x button. A lot of us Attach to Existing processes instead running the app in debug mode. Attach, Detach, and Exceptions should be default toolbar buttons.
By default stupid panes are displayed in the GUI. The best example is the Toolbox pane. How often are you drawing the GUI? If it’s every few minutes great, but most of us draw (if you’re inexperienced to use a static GUI) once and then spend hours writing and testing code. Close the Toolbox pane.