Visual Studio 2005's "My" framework is a double edge sword
Visual Studio 2005's "My" framework is a double edge sword
At first I thought this is a great feature but I can see why any seasoned .Net developer or teacher will hate it. New in VS2005 is the "My" framework, which is basically a massive set of aliases for the .Net framework written in a more understandable hierarchy. Instead of having to use System.IO.StreamReader() to get to a file it will use a more sensible My.Computer.FileSystem.ReadAllText("file.txt") which just points to the proper method(s) in the .Net framework.
For somebody learning .Net this can be a easy way to learn but the reality is, once they learn .Net that way, they will never switch to the way we've been using all along. Now that's not necessarily a bad thing but it will definitely make it harder for current .Net coders to work with new .Net coders. Overall I have to dislike this idea and hopefully it gets pulled before VS2005 ships. I see this as no different as MS merging two totally seperate frameworks into .Net and I am afraid it will really damage the ability for people to teach .Net and work with current developers.
Many developers already do this on their own small scale, like perhaps create a namespace of MyControls and only inherit the winform (or web) controls they use so they can have a smaller list of controls. But to implement this idea official into .Net complicates things and even opens the doors for MS to put new functionality into the My namespace which duplicates current .Net methods. This would be more likely to happen if some of the classes in My perform a couple steps into 1 method call that the current .Net framework already does. A perfect example is the example I listed, ReadAllText which didn't appear to require the creation of an object or the actual reading of a file.
I hate to be the kind of person that is afraid of change but this time MS is really getting me concerned.
You can read the entire MSDN article here.