In yet another sign of how little developers expect, Sriram is totally excited by a new feature in VisualStudio:

Object Test Bench is a new feature in Visual Studio 2005 which lets you visually execute code and play around with objects (read Partha's blog for a better and funnier description :-) ). Such tools have existed for other languages before (the Lisp REPL was probably the predecessor for all these tools) but in terms of Microsoft development tools, this is truly a first.

It's not that this isn't progress for the MS tools; what's sad is that it's progress that doesn't quite reach where Smalltalk was in 1980. Can you do that in a running application (i.e., a deployed one)? Can you add new methods and classes in those tools? Can you modify existing objects in those tools (i.e., add/remove attributes)? See what I mean? It's progress, but it's also just sad.