Dream Tools

Last night I read a rant about the state of development tools today. The guy had a good point. We got powerful hardware out there to run programs. Why can't we have powerful software development tools to make use of that hardware?

IDEs take a while to get your project started. Let's have an IDE that let's you start writing code immediately. Debuggers let you step through code with easy. How about we have debuggers that let you step backward in code execution, undoing the most recent operations?

Speaking of debuggers, let's get one that handles mutlithreaded apps with ease. Take it even further. Let's see if debuggers can trace through communication with other systems.

Finally here is a request that hits close to home. Recently we tried to build the first version of our next release. The thing was just not putting the files in the installation media. We have a manual process of inspecting the build output to ensure all went well. Why can't our build do that itself? It knows what's supposed to be in there. Let it automatically check what the heck actually went into the installable output.