As I’ve mentioned in the past, I do most of my development on desktop machines. But recently I’ve made a concerted effort to try programming in my “off hours” on the Tablet PC…in slate mode…without a keyboard…or external monitor. (Yeah, sounds crazy, but I really wanted to understand what it’s like.)
How’s it going? It’s passable.
Typing on the onscreen keyboard is laughably slow, but surprisingly workable. I do more copy/pasting that I would otherwise to compensate. I’ll even copy/paste a single character if I have to. It depends on what I’m doing, but sometimes it seems faster to select a single character, tap on the copy toolbar button, tap to the destination point and paste the character in rather than bring up the input panel and then type the desired character. I wouldn’t want to make a living working this way, but for making small editing changes it’s OK. Copy/paste buttons on the pen would sure be nice.
The screen real estate is compact so I’ve configured Visual Studio to autohide the Solution Explorer, Properties pane, and the other windows. I find working in Portrait mode the most efficient use of the screen. It works surprisingly well.
Editing toolbar bitmaps are, of course, a pleasure on the Tablet PC. In this one case the Tablet outshines the desktop and mouse. I just wish Visual Studio had a full-blown graphics editor built in. I have to drop down to Photoshop to do some bitmap editing and it’s not as enjoyable as using Visual Studio. I can’t wait for Visual Studio to have true color bitmap editing built in with professional-grade drawing tools for producing icons, toolbars and bitmaps.
One other thing I started doing more was using the drop down lists of function names that Visual Studio provides to navigate around the source code. When I’m typing on the keyboard I usually hop around the source by searching for text. However, when faced with the input panel, the drop list is a faster and more convenient way to go. IntelliSense is also a timesaver.
Overall, programming on the Tablet PC is slower, but adequate. A keyboard is really a necessity or at least a program like ShareKMC that enables you to use a keyboard from another computer. However, for light editing and debugging a Tablet PC without a keyboard is passable.
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