IL spy is almost useful to me but how the heck am I supposed to know simple stuff like what assembly System.Windows.MessageBox lives in?
SmartDevelop is now the built in macro editor for Autodesk's Revit software. This is supposed to be for fairly casual use. This is the program we're supposed to tell beginners to use because it's supposed to be simple(r). Now, imagine that you are a beginner for a second. You find some apparently simple code on the internet that you paste into the SharpDevelop editor:
System.Windows.MessageBox.Show("message");
You build the code and you get the ubiquitous error, "MessageBox does not exist in the current context".
Let's say this beginner digs and finds out that he has to add a reference. He goes to the Add Reference command. He looks at all the tabs; COM...nope, Project...nope, .Net Assembly Browser...nope (don't know where to look yet!), GAC...whatever that means...it looks promising but there is no assembly listed that says "System.Windows"! He gives up in shame.
The answer to the test is System.Windows.MessageBox lives in PresentationFramework.dll--but even I don't know that until I do a Google search. That information is simply not available in the SharpDevelop environment..
Lets say I dig around and find out I can download IL Spy to browse assemblies (just like good ol' VS Object Browser). I do a search for MessageBox and I get two hits. One in System.Windows and another in System.Windows.Forms. I inspect the information given for each and still no answer.
Hey-- I paste code all the time from the net and I get all kinds of "does not exist in the current context" messages and I have to do my due diligence and track down all those references. This is a tool we all use. Not just beginners. But it's super harder on them! This stuff needs to work and it needs to be front and center.
James LeVieux
P.S. I couldn't even write this post using IE10. The Message pane on the Compose tab was unresponsive. I had to use Chrome.