Visual Studio 11 Beta version is released recently. I'm to download and replace my VS2010, while i'm in the middle of some risky projects. How do you find it?
There are many aspects that I wish I can ride of them by putting VS2010 away:
Single Edmx diagram: It's very important to create separated (splitted) edmx files for large data models.
Weak garbage collection and memory management: Installing some or many extensions ends to memory problems and exceptions.
Weak modeling tools: one unanswered problem of mine is an example. Also, I couldn't check my layers references using layer diagram or other kind of available diagrams.
There are many other points, that you and me faced with them.
How's the VS 11 Beta? How did you find it? What are benefits and risks?
I wouldn't replace it. In fact, the user interface is a disaster and was the first thing to make me revolt and uninstall it after ten minutes of use. Now, a user interface doesn't stop me from doing work, sure, but this was so far from an improvement that I won't be touching it until Microsoft brings back some colour into the icons. Even then, the idea that mono-colour glyphs are easier for humans to perceive amongst a sea of other same-coloured glyphs on a background of the same colour is unfounded and unresearched. It seems more that were simply trying to "make it like the other stuff" without even doing any UX testing.
Humans fundamentally evolved colour eyesight because it aids in perceiving our environment. Grass is green, fire is orange, sky is blue, scary monsters are gray and scaly. When users have ten or more years of visual 'muscle' memory behind them, removing colour, let alone shape and form (in the form of object based icons) is disorienting and plain stupid.
No one ever complained that Visual Studio 2010 was too colourful and distracted them from their code, at least not in the way that the developers are complaining about the beta. If anything, it reinforces the structure of the IDE panel and toolbar layout by providing colour, shape and line cues in our peripheral vision.
I could go on, but given the almost universally negative feedback on this issue, I'm not alone in my frustration.
All the features in the world couldn't get me to use a UI like that, especially when I have a user interface as nice as Visual Studio 2010's. I had trouble separating the IDE into panels and objects. Which gray rectangle with gray shapes is the solution explorer. Which gray rectangle with gray shapes is the toolbox?
Well, visually, it is quite different. Really heavily inspired by WP7, and the expression blend suite.
I find it quite appealing visually speaking. It also seems more user friendly while installed out of the box (you can however import settings from your current VS installation, which I chose not to do)
You get some pack of additionnal tools, and seem easier to access (at lest IMO).
Concerning extensions, we will have to wait and see, but most of the extensions I use are quite good, and dont crash inexpectedly, so I believe the extension developper is more at fault than Visual Studio itself :).
You should simply try it out to see, because you can install side by side with your current VS install, it should not interfer
You can find Visual Studio 11 Beta here.
I haven't used it to be honest, although your question implies you're going to replace VS2010 with the new Beta version - that's not a good idea! You should be able to download and install it alongside Visual Studio 11 until it's released properly.
Related
I cant get the Graphical Debugger in VS 2012 Ultimate to work, & I have no idea why.
The debugger starts ok, but when I hit the print screen button, the debugger just says its waiting for DX to draw frames. [even after I exit]
I am sure the draw refers to the Present() in the swap chain. I am calling it [thats why you see the box down there]
Is there some bug I need to be aware of?
Edit:
I think the render target might be related to OMSetRenderTargets().
I called it exactly as the SDK sample did, so I don't know what else to think.
I'm a developer on the Visual Studio graphics diagnostic tools at Microsoft. I'm fairly new on the team, and I don't believe that any previous team members were actively watching Stack Overflow, so sorry about the wait on this question.
As it's been a few months I'm guessing that you might not have the repro around anymore. So such this might be a bit hard to diagnose here and now. From what you shared it looks like the playback engine (which we use to capture and replay DirectX data while the application is running) crash while trying to collect data on your application. Sadly with the first release of our tool (In VS 2012) stability issues of this type are more common then we would like. Simply a function of how we did collection on something as complex as DirectX. However since then, particularly with Update 2, we've made some very big strides with compatibility and stability. As a first step I'd make sure that you have all the VS updates installed as Update 2 was a big upgrade for the graphics diagnostic tools in particular (Preview of 2013 as well if you have access to that).
Why don't you use PIX instead http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-3PISvNTeB0
PIX Tutorial
I'm writing an add-in for both VS2008 and VS2010 and I'd like to have graphical enhancements that appear on top of the code (similar to Resharper/CodeRush). Doing so in VS2010 is relatively easy using adornments, however, how do I do it in VS2008? Anyone knows a good resource/article for something in that spirit?
I know that DXCore (CodeRush) allows one to do it, however, due to license restriction (I can't bundle DXCore with my addin) I am unable to do so.
Thank you
I've ended up implementing it by myself.
The general idea is to make a transparent form (Winforms or WPF), put the adornment you want in that form, and then overlay the form at the position of the code.
Since the editor was completely rewritten between 2008 and 2010 the technique for this is going to be totally different and it seems unlikely that now, 6 months after 2010 has launched, is a good time to start writing something for 2008, especially something difficult.
That said, a great source of sample code for editor extensions is http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/vsx. This is from the VSX team and has been very helpful to me while working on extensions.
I just saw this post on Microsoft Connect(while browsing on /.) about combining tab and indent option into one in VS2010.
They say they did ask here. But I don't see 8 comments being enough.
I usually use the default setting but sometime(in fact rarely) I do use customs settings.
They provide code and say it's our job now to manage these settings.
Final response, for now, from Microsoft;
Thanks again to everyone who has voiced an opinion on this issue. I unfortunately have to reiterate what I posted earlier: we cannot revert the UI for this before RTM. It's too late in the product cycle and too close to the VS 2010 ship date. Had the team heard this feedback a few months ago, the discussion about what to do for VS 2010 RTM could potentially have been reopened; again, we did phase in this change gradually and poll a wide variety of internal and external users to make sure all points of view could be considered before making a final decision. We'll be revisiting this issue for future versions and possibly for a VS 2010 service pack if/when one is to be released, but for RTM we're simply out of time.
Why are they doing this? Anyone know?
Well, the answer appears to be in the thread for your first link:
It's unfortunately not as simple as finding someone who wants a feature to be a certain way. Merging these two options into one eliminated a class of bugs that originated from setting them differently; we didn't consider changing this simply because we felt one fewer text box would constitute a significant improvement. In the absence of a critical mass of users who voiced negative feedback, we made the decision to update the options.
And those 8 comments weren't the only feedback they got, apparently. Quoting yet again:
Regarding user feedback on the decision to merge these two options, we asked a wide variety of people and phased in the changes gradually. We blogged publicly about the potential change on the VS Editor blog (admittedly not the most widely-read VS blog, but readership was significant enough to generate discussion): http://blogs.msdn.com/vseditor/archive/2009/03/19/how-do-you-use-tab-size-and-indent-size.aspx. We solicited feedback from members of Microsoft's MVP program, who spend a lot of time in Visual Studio, and from many internal teams and developers who use Visual Studio. We also phased in the change gradually: for Beta 1, Indent Size was disabled/grayed out and always set to the same value as tab size. In the absence of negative customer feedback on this, we merged the Tab Size and Indent Size options into a single “Tab and indent size” option for Beta 2.
I'm not saying it's a good idea, just that Microsoft appears not to have just inflicted this on their users without at least some consultation. I'm no Microsoft fan-boy in case you think I'm an apologist, other than XP at work, I pretty much use al free software. It just seems to me they may not be totally in the wrong here. And I have had experiences with customers trying to get changes made to software late in the cycle - it's a royal PITA :-)
More worrying to me would be the comment from your second link:
Visual Studio 2010 can support multiple font faces and multiple font heights
Colour and italicise my code all you want, but you'll have to prise my beloved fixed width font from my cold dead hands!
And I've just noticed that MS went out of their way to actually give a workaround to those people who vehemently want the setting kept separate. The comment on the second link, dated Dec 16 2009, gives an editor extension that allows different values to be set for tabs and indents. This is pretty darn good service if you ask me.
EDIT: As you can now see on the Connect bug, we've split the settings back out and I went through and fixed up all the behavior issues with the split options (minus 3 or so bugs that were in the VS2008 implementation, mostly around un-indenting). It won't be patched into the RC, but it'll be there when VS2010 ships.
(I'm a developer on the Visual Studio editor team)
To be accurate, we didn't precisely remove the feature; one of the tradeoffs we made while writing this piece of the new editor was that the cost of reimplementing it, relative to the numerous other things we had to write and what we thought the benefit was, was going to be fairly high. However, we weren't convinced that we had an accurate idea of what the benefit was, so Brittany did all of the things she listed to try and get a better idea of the impact, and again and again we were met with people who really didn't care (the vast majority of people seem to use 4/4). So we disabled it in Beta 1, and didn't get much negative feedback. We removed the option completely in Beta 2, and still didn't get very much negative feedback until the last 2 weeks, at which point it has become too late for us to put it back in (for RTM, at least).
Also, it isn't just a matter of re-enabling the option in the dialog (though that is basically what Brittany's extension does), as the editor itself still doesn't consider indentation/tab size to be different settings (internally, there is just TabSizeOptionId). Though the language services, which generally are the clients that care most about these settings, should handle them correctly, the editor doesn't distinguish between the two, and will end up using the tab size setting in cases where the indent size setting should probably be used.
I saw that Beta 1 of VS2010 was publicly availible.
My question to those of you who has tried it is: does it work good?
Will it cause my computer to blow up in tiny pieces? Will it crash randomly? Will it work with some minor glitches? Or is it just perfect from bottom up?
I'm only coding school- and hobby-stuff, so nothing that someones life depend upon, but i still want software that works. How close to a final product is it? Is it worth trying?
It's a bit slow, and there's no offline MSDN, but it's worth trying IMO. Having said that it's slow, I still use it on my NC10 netbook, so it's clearly not that bad :)
I've got it side-by-side VS2008, and that hasn't caused any problems.
I've seen a couple of glitches (once the keyboard handling went completely wonky) but it's certainly usable. The main question is what you want to get out of trying it - in my case I absolutely need to code against C# 4 to explore the new features. I do most of that from the command line in fact, where the speed of VS obviously isn't an issue, but it's nice to see the VS-specific features as well (like the debug threading views for Parallel Extensions).
It seems more or less usable on the .NET side. The C++ side is a bit more sketchy. On one hand, they've added support for some very nice new C++0x features, on the other, they've broken some absolute fundamentals.
Your plain old main function won't compile in 32-bit with unicode enabled. (Workarounds: Either compile as 64-bit, disable unicode, or rename the function to wmain).
This seems to me to be a strong hint that the C++ side of things is nowhere near release-worthy. I'd probably wait for beta2 before doing any serious work with that.
I would say it is great, but the performance hurts a bit.
Here is an idea for you: Install it into a VirtualPC. Then you can play and not care what it does. You don't like it, delete the VPC image and keep on trucking. That is how I play with Microsoft betas now. I never install them on any real machine - too risky.
Usable: Yes.
Recommended: Not if you'r a touchpad-addict or dislike crashing apps.
I've been trying it for 2 weeks now coding small C#-projects and these are my impressions
Reasons to use 2010:
Looks good
Multi monitor support
I can see myself using the code templating but right now i couldnt find any really useful stuff except for reducing the fontsize of comments.
Zoom in the editor
Select a variable and then press shift+up/down to go to next usage of this variable
Ctrl+, brings up instant search of classes and functions in the entire project. (i've become really addicted to this)
Floating watches for single objects
Reasons to not use 2010:
TOUCHPAD SCROLL DOESN'T WORK IN THE EDITOR!!! (this is reason enough to not upgrade if you are using it on a laptop)
I've had some random app-crashes in the middle of just writing code, once or twice per day maybe.
UI sometimes freezes randomly for about 30seconds and then returns to normal.
It started to use 100% CPU power from one of my cores once when it was minimized in basic editing-mode and i was doing other stuff in other programs, i only noticed it because the fan started to go wild.
Otherwhise it's pretty similar to 2008. I haven't noticed any difference in speed like other people say.
You need to ask yourself: what is the advantage for you in using VS2010 over VS2008? I would suggest that there is no advantage if all you are doing is "school- and hobby-stuff".
I'm still using VS2008 for business related stuff (and, indeed, VC6 for some stuff). I prefer to wait until all the early adopters have tested it (and Microsoft has released at least one service pack after the real product release) before I do their testing for them.
It seems to co-exist with other versions of VS without causing any problems.
Regarding the slowness - it seems to be the UI that is slow, rather than building. Once it's going it doesn't seem much slower on my fast quadcore. I've yet to try it on my laptop.
It's usable enough, the small glitches that I've encounter weren't that bad. However, certain VS extensions(like XNA) don't work in VS2010 at the moment.
It's fun to toy with. Not usable for me, cause re#er does not support it yet (had to install TestDriven .NET which works through keyboard shortcuts only to run my tests).
Gave me an insight how addicted I am. :/
Btw, on Win7, without virtual pc it seemed even faster than vs2008 for me.
VS2010 doesn't yet support mobile device projects, which might or might not matter to you.
VC++ wise - VS2010 has a built-in 64-bit compiler, VS2008 does not.
You can supposedly add 64-bit support to VS2008, but it takes some effort.
I've been using VS 2010 beta (with .NET 4.0 beta) on Windows 7 RC. I've been trying to rewrite parts of a large-scale business application in it to see what can be done with it.
The UI freezes frequently. I'm talking 1-10 minutes between freezes. The UI does not come back, so I'm forced to kill devenv.exe every time it happens. Microsoft probably puts my error reports in their spam folder by now.
For me, VS 2010 beta 1 classifies as unusable. However, it's fast, the new IDE functions are very handy, and it's pretty. I keep coming back to it despite my resolutions to wait for a stable build.
In my department, we are currently using ReSharper 4.0 and deciding whether to upgrade to 4.5 upon its release next week. I personally am a huge fan of ReSharper however a number of my colleagues have pointed out that they have been using a plug in from DevExpress called Refactor Pro that performs similar functionality.
http://www.devexpress.com/Refactor
http://www.jetbrains.com/resharper/beta.html
Has anyone previously compared these tools and hold any strong views on which tool would give us the greatest increase in productivity and why?
In my department, we also use ReSharper. Today, I installed 4.5, but had already used 3.something, 4.0 and 4.1 before. It really offers many great refactoring and code-writing supporting functions, renaming methods and functions, reordering parameters...
What I really like is that according to your corporate code style, you can configure ReSharper to give you hints on style violations in different severity levels (and quickly apply according changes, like MS StyleCop, but much easier to configure and more subtle).
My absolute favorite feature is Class-Searching by entering only the CamelCases, i.e. you type TSHWLOV and ReSharper will know that you mean the class from some referenced library named 'TerrificSearchHelperWithLotsOfVoodoo'.
Last year I have tried the DevExPress CodeRush/RefactorThis-Alternative, after I was quite impressed by the things that Oliver Sturm did with it on BASTA Spring 08.
The interface catchier and more impressive than Resharper, there are huge arrows flipping around your IDE and things like that, though the core functionality is rather similar.
I had the feeling that CodeRush is more focussed on code creation than on refactoring, i.e. more shortcuts for tasks like creating variables etc.
My favorite feature there was a sidebar, which always shows you all keyboard-shortcuts available in your current context. This makes you learn those commands quickly, where in ReSharper you have to look up most of them in nested submenus.
Both suites are really powerful and it after months of using them you will probably still discover new functions, which you have always needed without knowing it.
However, I decided in favor of ReSharper mostly because of I was more familiar with it and DevExpress was using much resources on my notebook and occasionally even slowed it down. By now, I use a much more powerful machine again, maybe I will give it another try soon.
I personally prefer CodeRush.
I find R#'s interface drives my (admittedly minor) OCD tendencies crazy. The little lightbulb insists on appearing on the far left of the screen, even if it's advice pertains to something in the middle or on the right. I find it garish and distracting.
By contrast, CodeRush's equivalent smart tag is lower contrast and smaller. It is therefore capable of locating itself within the code without distracting from said code. I find I can ignore this SmartTag when I need to, and it is always right in front of me when I decided I need it.
It is mainly this, that has prevented me from wanting to explore R# any further.
As far as CodeRush's feature set: Code Analysis, Refactorings, CodeProviders, Templates, TabToNextReference, QuickNavigation and many more.
I especially like CodeRush's extensibility which has allowed myself and several others to create many plugins for use within it. (http://code.google.com/p/dxcorecommunityplugins/)
CodeRush also has some top quality support and a very active community of users.
Certainly neither R# or CodeRush will suit all users. Every one has their own preferences. However, if you've not tried both, you should certainly do so.
If you come from the R# side of the equation and are looking to test out CodeRush, then you may find the compatibility plugin useful (http://code.google.com/p/dxcorecommunityplugins/wiki/CR_ReSharperCompatibility)
In addition CodeRush has a Free edition 'CodeRush Xpress' which Microsoft commissioned DevExpress to create, and which they have licensed on behalf of every user of Visual Studio 2008. This partnership will continue into VS2010 upon it's release.
If you have any questions regarding CodeRush you can find details for contacting me at the bottom of my community wiki page.
I should say that I do not work for DevExpress. I am what you might call a DevExpress MVP. To maintain this position, I answer questions in the DevExpress forums (and nothing else).
Everything I say is my own honest opinion.
If you have any questions, feel free to contact me :)
I'm using DevExpress which has a lot of "hidden" functionality, so you need to read the manuals to know how to activate some of the functionality. I find it very passive and subtle.
I used ReSharper and found it buggy and very invasive in my coding style. Bracket-closing drove me nuts, it ignored my preferences and couldn't cope with how I write my lines of code - which may not be most efficient but it's one of those things that ain't gonna change!
I've tried both, and really didn't get along with ReSharper. I found it to be just too intrusive for my coding style. When I switched to CodeRush / Refactor! it was like I'd found the perfect aid to my productivity. The refactorings are, for the most part, exactly what I wanted to see from this kind of product.
It is, however, horses for courses and you may well find that you prefer ReSharper. The best advice I can give is to try the other products and see which you prefer.
The only correct answer is to use both, of course! I do. You need a beefy laptop though. If I had to choose only one, I'd choose ReSharper... I think the static code analysis is a lot better.
ReSharper has a lot of great features, and DevExpress has a lot of great features.
When you put the two together, you end up w/ whole lot of AWESOME.
You need to jump through a few hoops to make them play nicely together: http://frazzleddad.blogspot.com/2010/01/making-devexpress-resharper-play-nicely.html
R# 4.5 is a free upgrade if you have a 4.0 license. So I'd suggest to get and use it - changing the "productivity tool" is always a pain because you'll have to get used to different ways, keyboard shortcuts etc. of doing things - no matter how good the tool actually is.
I have a personal copy of Refactor Pro but I use R# 4.1 at work with the StyleCop add-in as that is the team standard tool. I like RfP's arrows and code positioning stuff which is better than R#. Otherwise the tools are very similar.
However, at this time, its the StyeCop add-in that swings it in favor of R# for me.
Cheers
Benjy