Intellisense: Perhaps I’m doing injustice to the other features, but the IDE improvements, and the new intellisense engine in particular, is what got me excited about QTP Atlantis. So I was pretty much on the edge of my seat when we’ve gotten to this last part of the presentation. I’m very pleased to say that it was every bit what I imagined it to be, with the exception of intellisense for VBScript classes, and intellisense in the debug viewer (both won’t be implemented). Luckily, there are workarounds for both these issues through thePDM hack (for debug intellisense), and WSC registration (for VBScript Class intellisense through COM).
We saw a demonstration of how creating an Excel COM object provided a full intellisense for all its methods and properties, for as many levels as we’d like. Every variable set to this object also presented the same intellisense, and the autocomplete caught every variable we’ve defined or used (yes, there’s autocomplete for variable names!). The autocomplete and intellisense features worked smoothly, and presented no apparent performance issue. It’s still left to be seen how it functions in a real script, with hundreds / thousands code lines.
While not perfect, this presents a huge improvement, and will no doubt improve our productivity tenfold. Tasks and Comment Pane: QTP has a new bottom pane which includes a run-of-the-mill implementation of tasks and comments. Double clicking a comment will take you to the relevant code-line, though strangely enough, you cannot do this with a task (i.e., tasks cannot be linked to specific code lines). It was mentioned that enabling the comments feature for function libraries may sometimes cause performance issues.
Dynamic code-zones: When standing inside a code block like If, While, Do, etc, the IDE will mark the relevant block with blue lines, making it much more easy to make your way inside nested blocks of this sort (somewhat like highlighting left-right bracket pairs). While it will surely make our life easier, a more robust mechanism like collapsible code-regions is still needed.
Custom Toolbars: You can add your own buttons and commands to QTP toolbars and menus. While this does not include inner-QTP macros, you can assign a program / File shortcut to your own button / menu item. It’s nice, but i think it will only gain power once QTP’s inner mechanisms will be bindable to such buttons.
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