If you look back over the years, you'll realize that source code editing in .NET hasn't really changed a whole lot.   One tab per source code file is pretty much the standard.   Back in the pre-.NET Visual Basic days, it was possible to edit the code so only one function was showing at a time.   This was a nice feature and I wish there was a way to edit .NET code more like this.   This still doesn't go as far as it's possible to go though.

A student at Brown University, Andrew Bragdon, has been working on a great new user interface paradigm for coding: Code Bubbles.   Instead of a window per file, bubbles are content regions that represent functions/methods.   Unlike classic Visual Basic, instead of using a tab for this region, it creates stand-alone boxes with rounded borders.   These make it easy to create/edit code, including visualizing the connections between functions.

Even better, it lends itself extremely well to debugging.   You can step through code, examine variables, and jump to called code as needed in a highly-visual manner.  

Finally, you can easily add new content to your view such as comments, documentation, or even bug tracking information.

All of these bubbles are laid out in a virtual scrolling workspace.   Different regions can be named based on the what's being worked on, and specific code methods can be opened more than once in different contexts.   It would require a somewhat large monitor.   The sample video is at 1920x1200, and even with that, it seems to be using artificially narrow code (maybe 40-50 characters wide).   With standard code that gets pretty wide, this would lead to less fitting on the screen, but with such high resolution monitors becoming common, it will be less of an issue.

It's really exciting to see such an innovative change like this.   I'd love to see Microsoft move in this direction with Visual Studio, but ultimately, considering how extensible their new WPF-based shell is, someone else could come along and implement something similar.   Here's hoping!

Source: codebubbles.org