Aymeric posted a link on the Readify internal tech list today showing a fresh approach to navigating code in an IDE. Here’s the link: http://www.cs.brown.edu/people/acb/codebubbles_site.htm

And here’s the YouTube vid to save you clicking through.

It’s a really novel and interesting idea and one I would absolutely love to see working in Visual Studio 2010.  Given that 2010 uses WPF under the hood and has a great extensibility model, I think it’s entirely do-able, though not something I’d take on myself.  I wonder just how much it would change the way we approach common conventions such as one class per files when the IDE effectively removes the whole source file concept allowing you to focus solely on your classes and their methods.

Kudos to Andrew Bragdon for coming up with this. It begs the question then… If you had to rethink the IDE what crazy, out of the box ideas would you come up with?