I have heard several podcasters (most recently the guys on DotNetRocks) say that the look and feel of Visual Studio 2010 has been completely redesigned and Visual Studio rewritten in WPF.
I have been watching some demos on channel9 of the Visual Studio 2010 CTP and the only thing that looks different to me is the opening screen.
I read the notice on MSDN, but it doesn't say anything about the look/design of Visual Studio.
Has Microsoft reversed direction on this or are there going to be major changes made to UI of the final product?
I'm guessing 3D with a space theme. You'll be able to "fly through" your code, "orbiting" classes, "shooting down" bugs and "launching" your code.
It's way too soon to make guesses about what it will look like: I don't even think that they know what it will look like.
However, from what I've heard, they are in fact rewriting portions to be WPF/C#, but they are not throwing everything out and starting from scratch. Instead, they will be rewriting portions as it makes sense. For example, I saw that they have some new UML tools that definitely look to be done in WPF.
Uh, the beta has been available for over a month. I have been playing with Visual Studio 2010 on and off. It is very similar to 2008 in overall design.
You can download it here and see for yourself where they are taking the product:
Download Page at Microsoft.com
There are a metic ton of videos on Channel9 about VS2010, TFS 2010 and then the PDC 2008 sessions online as well. They are also starting a new series called 10-4 dedicated just to VS2010 - a walk through of sorts.
Let's pray that they don't dink with anything, visually. My #1 guess is that they'll try and wrap the new office ribbon bar around our necks. ;|
I've heard that its going to have a historical debugger.
Also- this should prob be a wiki
From WPF Wonderland:
Visual Studio 2010 gets WPF facelift
WPF has been out for a couple years. That’s long enough that new releases of Microsoft products are sprouting WPF interfaces.
Last year at PDC Microsoft announced that the code editor in Visual Studio would be re-written in WPF. Microsoft didn’t stop at the code editor though. Today Jason Zander, GM for Visual Studio, revealed the new WPF based IDE.
Highlights from the PDC Keynote #1 on Day 2 (see: PDC website)
Multi-monitor support for the IDE via
WPF.
Building classes from test classes.
Toggle TFS bugs over a code segment
in Debug mode.
Partial config files for debug,
release.
WYSIWYG Silverlight Designer.
Related
For those with experience of VS2008 and VS2010. Are there any areas in which you prefered 2008? Any annoyances with the upgrade?
Any reasons not to upgrade?
I'm coming at this from a Web Dev point of view.
Thanks
I think it depend principally of how you use VS.
If your goal is to continue to use Windows Form without Linq (some people stay with VB6...), VS 2010 don't seems to be a good investment...
But if you use, or plan to use WPF and co., VS 2010 seems to be a good investment for me !
So, i think it's interesting to ask yourself : "Any reason NOT to upgrade to WPF and Linq ?"
About your the fear of change like Office 2003 -> Office 2007
Yes, me too, i feel "dropped to my grandma's level"...
But i feel like that too with the change Windows Form -> WPF.
It's good for me : it's not with the improvement of the candle the the bulb was invented !
Office 2007 is for me a great improvement for the user interface...
But it's just my point of vue.
The main reason to upgrade to Visual Studio 2010 is the .NET Framework's new version 4.0, and all the accompanying tools you can use.
If you don't need this new version now, you can delay the upgrade: that's a reason.
But sooner or later, because we all know that we can't stay behind, we'll have to step forward... This is why all of us are using Visual Studio 2008 instead of Visual Studio 6.0 and build software for Windows 7 instead of Windows 98...
If you're in a team, one person upgrading forces all of your developers to have to upgrade as the Solution files and Project files will be marked as being 2010 format and VS2008 won't read them. One of our developers checked in a project using a 2010 beta and now we can't work on it as we didn't buy 2010 yet :(
I suggest you get VS2010 Express (when it's around) and experiment with it as far as performance goes. It's not quite the same as the full version, but close enough to spot big problems I should think.
With the general public release of Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 today, this latest version has created a lot of hype and interest.
Indeed, the opinion I've gauged is that VS 2010 has resolved a great deal of the minor flaws left over from previous versions, as well as added some particularly useful new code editor and project development tools (in particular the Premium/Ultimate versions).
My question here is: what are you favourite new features in VS 2010 that have really got you excited? Or similarly, what are the flaws of VS 2008 that you are most glad to have resolved?
There is a wealth of changes in VS 2010, of course, but these are some of the ones that have interested me most (about which I know!).
Integrated support for F# (with multi-targeting for .NET 2.0 - 4.0)/
Much improved WPF designer. The VS 2008 was more than a bit buggy at times.
Great improvements to the code editor, such as call hierarchy viewing.
A decent add-in framework.
A greatly expanded testing framework (now capable of database testing, for example) in Premium/Ultimate.
Project planning and modelling features in Premium/Ultimate.
If I could request one point/feature per post, I think that would be best, so we could vote them individually.
Visual Studio 2010's true Multi-Monitor Support sounds pretty fantastic.
The feature I'm most looking forward to having a decent play with is actually more .net 4 than visual studio. Parallel Extensions looks like it will be very interesting.
The new, clean web.config should make my managers happy.
"Just change the option in the web.config"
"Where is it?"
"Under 'AppSettings.'"
"Ugh ... there's so much junk in that file."
The built in profiler and historical debugger!
The 'Navigate To' window (Ctrl+,) is fantastic. Eclipse has something similar, and I've always thought Visual Studio needed it. Now if they would just add a 'Collapse All' button to the Solution Explorer...
One-click web publishing will be handy.
Favorite feature? Requiring 4 gigs of RAM to run it's bloat.
I liked many features
Deployment
Gated checkin
Parallel Programming
Faster debugging
Separate debugger for x86 and x64
These are just few.... The more you explore VS2010 the more you will get. Try to go through the videos by microsoft.
Thanks,
Sunil Agarwal
I've been stuck with visual studio 2003 for ages because of my need to debug asp classic code...
A few years ago I tried to debug classic asp with vs 2005 with no luck, I think there was some dirty hack that was supposed to achieve that "magic", but I couldn't make it work...
I wonder if anybody has been luckier than me...
Haven't tried yet with vs 2008, but I'm not very confident on that, due to the lack of support to classic asp from microsoft...
--
edit:
oops!, just found the following question
Does Visual Studio 2008 support classic ASP development?
so it seems like visual studio 2008 really supports classic asp debugging...
I'll leave the question open for a couple of days, just in case someones wants to add some tutorial, comment or anything interesting...
--
edit:
some links
the dirty visual studio 2005 hack I was talking about:
http://blogs.msdn.com/greggm/archive/2006/03/15/552108.aspx
a few links explaining how to debug classic asp with visual studio 2008, couldn't try any of them yet...
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/debug/DebugVBScriptVS2008.aspx
http://codepagoda.com/2009/04/30/debugging-classic-asp-with-visual-studio-2008-sp1-and-35-framework/
http://bytes.com/groups/asp/836751-better-debugging-classic-asp-visual-studio-2008-sp1
I have debugged Classic ASP in Visual Studio 2005. Also, Visual Studio 2008 was supposed to make it better, but I never had a chance to try or to find out the details.
Your biggest problem is that Visual Studio 2005 took away the ability to "Start With Debug" an ASP application.
In VS 2005, Microsoft completely changed the way the debugger connected to IIS. The old way (for both ASP and ASP.NET) which was used by everything from InterDev (remember InterDev?) through VS 2003 was orchestrated via the "Machine Debug Manager", a sort of intermediary helper service. The whole thing was... arcane, trying to solve a complex problem that was made harder by the fact that IIS and Visual Studio run under separate accounts and in some cases, different machines. This was a very delicate process that was very prone to break at the slightest configuration change.
Every single one of my machines stopped being able to debug Classic ASP at some point or another for reasons that appeared related to the alignment of the stars. I used to have at hand a 14 page checklist printout that described the whole "incantation", jumping from IIS Manager to Visual Studio to User Account Manager, to COM+ Explorer... and even that didn't always work. It makes me shiver just thinking about it.
Ultimately, they gave up. In Visual Studio 2005, Microsoft came up with a different architecture for debugging IIS applications (sorry; I don't know how it works now). At the time, MS decided that not enough people were using ASP anymore, and prioritized other work on top of it. Enabling ASP debugging through the new architecture was a significant amount of work especially for a technology on its way out, so it got chopped. I don't blame them; they made a sound business decision. Would you rather have no ASP debugging in VS 2005? Or yes ASP debugging on VS "2006"?
Anyway, not all is lost.
First, you can't "launch" the debugger with F5 anymore, but you can still attach manually to an already running ASP process and it will work, as long as you enable debugging in IIS Manager by hand. The experience in Visual Studio 2005 is sometimes better, sometimes worse than under older versions. It's certainly more stable and very much doable. More details below.
Second, I heard at some point that Visual Studio 2008 was supposed to make a come back and get ASP debugging back in the product, or at least bring some improvement, or some such -- I could never quite get a clear picture. Then I lost track of the whole thing because by some miracle I've kept myself out of dealing much with ASP projects for a few years now.
I'll try to find more references on VS 2008 and classic ASP. If I find something, I'll edit this post with it (sorry -- it might take me a few days to get to it).
More details can be found in these posts:
Full instructions on how to debug by manual attaching in this Gregg Miskelly post: Debugging Classic ASP Code
Other related information can be found here and at other Mikhail Arkhipov posts.
Hope this helps.
In relation to this stackoverflow question, how would I go about creating my own Visual Studio 2008 plug-in?
I've checked the Visual Studio Developer Centre on MSDN, but the amount of info is overwhelming. There are loads of project types, and I don't even know where to start.
Where should I start looking if I want to write something which meets the following requirements:
A plug-in that runs like a "service" in Visual Studio, and is able to poll Visual Studio for information, and handle Visual Studio events.
The info I'd like to access from VS are things like, what projects are currently open, who has them open, and other solution/project file based info.
The events I'd like to be able to handle are things like, the opening/closing/editing/creating/deleting of Solutions / Projects / individual files.
I'd also like to be able to handle any interaction with VS on a per solution basis. So, I'd like to handle any interaction with files, even code editing, but also, just other interaction, like with the menus, or just the IDE itself.
As well as these, I'd also like to be able to store data somewhere. Where is this usually done? Can I add Metadata to the Solution file? Or, does it make sense to save this info to a small local instance of a database, that is somehow attached to the solution..?
I just need a push in the right direction, is any of this possible? What part of the Visual Studio Developer Centre should I focus on? What APIs should I check out?
cheers!
An add-in can do most of that. There's a template in VS2008 for creating a base add-in.
I have an add-in that you can download that hooks into the solution/project load events etc - it is free and comes with source code ( http://www.huagati.com/projectloader/download/huagatiprojectloader.zip ). This particular add-in detects when projects/solutions are loaded and pre-loads referenced assemblies to work around a CLR bug that can cause VS2008 to crash. Anyway, the source code for it shows how to detect some of the events you're looking for.
Other than that, the definitive resource on add-in development and all the little quirks and tricks involved is Carlos Quintero's blog ( http://msmvps.com/blogs/carlosq/ ) and the "howto" article series on his website ( http://www.mztools.com/resources_vsnet_addins.aspx ).
Craig Skibo's blog ( http://blogs.msdn.com/craigskibo/ ) also has some useful tips.
You want:
Visual Studio Extensibility Developer Center
VSX Forum
Visual Studio 2008 SDK
Professional Visual Studio Extensibility by Keyvan Nayyeri
Buy the book, if nothing else.
OK, so see questions like this one and this one and the question I have is - does one have to use Expression Blend to do Silverlight development or can any of it be done with just Visual Studio? (2008, in this case)
I haven't gotten started using Silverlight yet and through my workplace's MSDN I can get Expression Blend without any issues, but for my side work, do I have to drop the $499 for Expression Blend 2? (I know there's a trial but I'm thinking beyond that)
Obviously I'm concerned that in order to get into Silverlight development there's a huge financial investment involved and I already own Visual Studio 2008 - is it possible to do development without Expression Blend or would that just be impossible?
You can do everything in Visual Studio. But then again you can do everything in Notepad as well... it all depends on how much the given tool will help you along in the process. Having Blend will be a great asset from a design point of view but wont really do much for you in terms of programming the application. Download the trial and see how it works... if it adds value and saves time then it's well worth the purchase.
I've heard rumours that since there is no Expression Blend Express or Expression Blend Light that there will at least for a while always be a version of Blend in a "Preview" state and the next one will come out before the previous one expires.
That being said, it would be hard to bet your business on something like that. There are third party tools like Kaxaml that can do some of the things Blend can do and I wouldn't be surprised to see more to fill this niche.
You can do it in Visual Studio 2008 and it will work. The issues that I have come across in trying to only do Visual Studio is that I find I can do things a lot quicker in Blend than I can in Visual Studio. The visual designers are different enough that, depending on what you are going to do, you may find yourself using both environments.
If you are doing just small projects, and not a lot of UI components, then you can get away with just Visual Studio. However if you are doing a lot of design work and UI is important to you, then I would recommend geting the entire expression studio as you will find yourself using Blend and Designer.
It quite is possible. If you don't care too much about the eye candy.
Blend is more of a designer's tool than a development tool.
You could try the Microsoft Action Pack Special edition for Web Solutions if you are at least a Microsoft Registered Partner.
And now you can even use Eclipse. :)