7 ms·

Visual Studio 2012 and .NET Framework 4.5 released

143 points by cygwin98 14y ago

barefoot 14y ago
I've been using (publicly available) pre-release versions of Visual Studio 2012 since late last year. The all-capital elements certainly appear to be a stylistic design decision but it's used so sparingly (and less so now) that it's difficult to complain about. If it's not for style then it's a brilliant channeling of focalism in a release with hundreds if not thousands of changes: "What's wrong?" "The menu casing - the main menu is all in capital letters!" "That's all?" [Pause] "You mentioned a discount if I buy today, right?" Not to sound like a shill, but the IDE includes a number of practical improvements over 2010 that are much appreciated. Projects now load in the background, search has been embraced and works extremely well, and for all of the complaints about the UI it's a lot less visually noisy and just feels better to work with over longer coding sessions.
- weazl 14y ago
  That is not all, there is also a distinct lack of contrast in both brightness and color all over, also all icons look pretty much the same so they're essentially useless. In an effort to "focus on the content" everything else have taken a back seat, to hell with useability and a visually pleasing experience.
guilloche 14y ago
I remember that I saw the news that MS would not continue to develope .Net and would focus on C++ again and shift to html5.
- freehunter 14y ago
  I don't remember Microsoft saying that. What I do remember is a bunch of blogs getting a bit antsy because Microsoft wouldn't tell them how .NET was going to evolve for Windows 8. They blew this up into "Microsoft is abandoning .NET and orphaning 600,000 developers!"
cygwin98 14y ago
It's great that the new async feature is made official now. Off topic: Is that team in the picture behind VS and .NET? That seems extremely a small number of developers out there. I was expecting at least a few hundreds of people.
- walkon 14y ago
  Possibly just the VS team without any .NET and language teams.
  - sriramk 14y ago
    The VS team is many orders of magnitude than what you see there. I suspect that those are just the release PMs.
    - walkon 14y ago
      Two orders of magnitude (which isn't all that "many") would make that 2,400 people working on the Visual Studio shell. Although its likely there are many more than pictured, I can't imagine it being thousands.
      - sriramk 14y ago
        DevDiv (which makes up both Visual Studio, .NET and a bunch of other stuff) had ~5K people when I left. So very definitely possible. Also, I'm not sure what you mean by the 'shell'. VS is a huge beast and has dozens of components, several of them coming from outside the VS team.
      - city41 14y ago
        I worked on VS2010 on a team that provided functionality delivered inside the shell. It's very hard to say how many people actually work on VS as a whole, but it's a whole heck of a lot of people. Pretty much all of DevDiv has at least something to do with VS. Then there are teams outside of DevDiv that also contribute (such as mine, I was on a SQL Server team). I do agree the team responsible for the shell itself is probably not too big.
runako 14y ago
I am astonished that they shipped VS 2010 knowing that it took over 20 seconds after launch to start editing VB code. Kudos for the improvement, though.
- adrr 14y ago
  VS 2010 was a big turd of an IDE. I wonder how this version compares to VS.net 2008.
  - beagle3 14y ago
    I feel everything since VC++6 (released 1998, if I'm not mistaken) has been going downhill. (I don't really like .net -- I'm referring primarily to the C++ IDE; and I also think the VB6 IDE is nicer than any VB.NET one)
    - photon137 14y ago
      ...has been going downhill. ...I'm referring primarily to the C++ IDE How, specifically?
      - beagle3 14y ago
        Snappiness is the thing that bothers me most: With VC6, on my machine in 2000: While debugging, I could press "F10", keep it pressed (to single step instructions), raise my finger when I get to the right place. It all worked instantly. Now, it feels like there's half a second response time to each one of those keypresses. While building, I could stop execution (Shift-F5) and restart (F5) in about 0.3 seconds if I didn't change any source file. VS 2010 takes about 3 seconds, on a really simple project, to figure out that it doesn't need to rebuild anything before starting. And then, it takes another second to actually start my code. WTF?
      - runako 14y ago
        11 seconds to start editing code, for starters. I don't remember VS6 being anywhere near that slow.
Rickasaurus 14y ago
I'm so excited about F# type providers I can't even put it into words. Strongly typed access directly into datasets is going to save me so much frickin time.
aaronbrethorst 14y ago
THE MENUS ARE STILL SCREAMING AT US, I REALLY WISH THEY'D CHANGED THAT BACK, SINCE IT MAKES IT A LOT HARDER TO READ. Edit: there are actually studies on this. See, for example, this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_caps#Readability http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_caps#Readability Edit 2: Also considering that, once upon a time, I was the Program Manager who would've owned implementation of this misfeature, I feel entitled to complain.
- stephengillie 14y ago
  Stupid question: Why can't we create skins for VS the way we used to skin Winamp?
- sergiotapia 14y ago
  Like you actually need to have readability for single word menu options. Stop nitpicking y tratando de buscarle cinco pies al gato.
- jjcm 14y ago
  I've been using it for the last 5 months or so. Honestly, it's 15 labels at the top, all of which I know the positioning of. They could be cryptic/obscure symbols from The 5th Element, and I'd still know what each one does based on their position. Yea, it takes a couple more seconds to parse the menus the first time you look at it, but after a while you memorize what they are anyway. If menu readability is the worst thing people can find about VS2012, then I'd say they did an OK job with it.
  - MichaelGG 14y ago
    I don't think most people are honestly saying "oh dear, how will I ever find the Debug menu". They're objecting to an obviously annoying move with no clear rationale. The VS beta had an entirely different set of text in all caps. The fact that they had to hunt around capitalizing stuff in order to "Metro-ize" it just shows its mainly a political move. (Office 2013 has also gone the route of randomly capitalizing things; there is apparently no motivating rationale for which parts of the UI on a desktop app deserve caps.) Users are rightly annoyed that Microsoft's making these silly changes, and because they're so visible, of course there will be a lot of vocal feedback. A more cynical person might even think this was by design: Make one really prominent annoying feature, and drown out concerns on anything else.
highace 14y ago
I especially like the VS2012 web inspector - it's like having Firebug or Chrome Inspector plugged into the live code, html, and css, so any changes you make are saved.
- sergiotapia 14y ago
  This changes EVERYTHING.
  - rodly 14y ago
    Are you being sarcastic? Low quality comment nonetheless. --- To parent of his comment, what do you mean exactly? Firebug already lets you change code and see the results immediately.
    - megaman821 14y ago
      Firebug doesn't sync the changes back to the original code.
      - rodly 14y ago
        Sync the changes to the source file? How would any client do that without write permissions? Or is that the point?
        rjzzleep 14y ago
        you might want to take a look at https://github.com/adobe/brackets/ https://github.com/adobe/brackets/ can't say i'm particularly thrilled at the idea though
- ConstantineXVI 14y ago
  I know IDEA (IntelliJ, RubyMine, etc.) has an browser-tied debugger as well; haven't made much use of either for web dev so can't give a fair opinion on how they compare.
sergiotapia 14y ago
I've downloaded and used the RC and ran it on Windows 8 and I'm lovin' it. Great interface, the solutions explorer has a lot more built in options. The CSS features are superb, and MVC support is great. I'm really looking forward to it.
elktea 14y ago
There's some nice WPF features in the 4.5 release, it's a shame it seems to have been replaced with WinRT as the UI language of choice in Windows 8.
ConstantineXVI 14y ago
IIRC, the low-end ("Professional") MSVS 2010 outside of MSDN still came with some sort of basic access that got you the current Windows; does 2012 still have that? I don't see any mention of it on the store page.
- rjzzleep 14y ago
  afair 2012 only allows for windows 8 apps. for the rest youd probably have to use an older runtime with vs 2011 express.
  - tedunangst 14y ago
    The currently available release of Express only supports Windows 8 (Metro) apps. The Pro version supports "desktop" apps, as does a supposedly forthcoming Express version.
    - usea 14y ago
      Currently I can build desktop apps without downloading VS at all. The compiler (csc.exe) and MSBuild come with the free Windows SDK. The libraries (System.Windows.Forms etc) come with .NET. How have they restricted this ability in 2012 express edition?
      - tedunangst 14y ago
        I don't know. I'm not running Windows 8, so all I can tell you is I read the web page and repeated what it said. Maybe they simply omitted the "create new project" button.
eswangren 14y ago
I just hope it's faster. VS has been getting noticeably slower with each release since 6. It's unbearable at times.
- redact207 14y ago
  Really? When was the last time you upgraded? It's been getting noticeably faster since 2008.
  - modernshoggoth 14y ago
    Agree and disagree. At my last job I had 6, 2008 & 2010 all installed (legacy apps, yay). 6 was amazingly responsive but sucked if you had to read/write anything (like, say, compiling). 2008 was average-slow at everything. 2010 had a go-away-&-make-a-coffee startup time that pounded the HDD, but after that was VERY fast given the complexity of the jobs it was given.
  - seanmcdirmid 14y ago
    I can't believe anyone could say this with a straight face when comparing VS2010 with VS2008. 2012 is much improved and almost feels as fast as 2008.
    - eswangren 14y ago
      I never used 2008, so I see why you might say that. I went from 6 -> 2005 -> 2010. 2010 is slow as a dog. 2005 is slower than 6.
- berkut 14y ago
  Updating intellisense!!
- echion 14y ago
  There are some actual numbers here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudio/archive/2012/07/16/improved-toolbox-performance-delivers-highly-responsive-visual-studio-2012.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudio/archive/2012/07/16/impr...
rbanffy 14y ago
Loved the HEY, YOU GUYS FORGOT #0: A FRIENDLY, SCREAM-CENTRIC UI, READY TO SHOUT AT EVERY DIRECTION HOW MUCH IT LOVES YOU. THANKS, I FEEL LIKE USING COBOL AGAIN! comment.
jiggy2011 14y ago
Wow, that's an ugly UI. And this is coming from somebody who uses Eclipse. Visual Studio was nice because it always felt "cosy" and fitted very nicely into Windows. I'm not even sure what this looks like, is it supposed to be Metro? Reminds me more of Java Swing. The lack of any embossing or clear separation on icons/menus looks like it's going to difficult to mouse with.
modarts 14y ago
WHAT'S UP WITH THE ALL CAPS MENU?

143 points by cygwin98 14y ago

I've been using (publicly available) pre-release versions of Visual Studio 2012 since late last year. The all-capital elements certainly appear to be a stylistic design decision but it's used so sparingly (and less so now) that it's difficult to complain about. If it's not for style then it's a brilliant channeling of focalism in a release with hundreds if not thousands of changes: "What's wrong?" "The menu casing - the main menu is all in capital letters!" "That's all?" [Pause] "You mentioned a discount if I buy today, right?" Not to sound like a shill, but the IDE includes a number of practical improvements over 2010 that are much appreciated. Projects now load in the background, search has been embraced and works extremely well, and for all of the complaints about the UI it's a lot less visually noisy and just feels better to work with over longer coding sessions.

weazl 14y ago
That is not all, there is also a distinct lack of contrast in both brightness and color all over, also all icons look pretty much the same so they're essentially useless. In an effort to "focus on the content" everything else have taken a back seat, to hell with useability and a visually pleasing experience.

guilloche 14y ago

I remember that I saw the news that MS would not continue to develope .Net and would focus on C++ again and shift to html5.

freehunter 14y ago
I don't remember Microsoft saying that. What I do remember is a bunch of blogs getting a bit antsy because Microsoft wouldn't tell them how .NET was going to evolve for Windows 8. They blew this up into "Microsoft is abandoning .NET and orphaning 600,000 developers!"

cygwin98 14y ago

It's great that the new async feature is made official now. Off topic: Is that team in the picture behind VS and .NET? That seems extremely a small number of developers out there. I was expecting at least a few hundreds of people.

walkon 14y ago
Possibly just the VS team without any .NET and language teams.
- sriramk 14y ago
  The VS team is many orders of magnitude than what you see there. I suspect that those are just the release PMs.
  - walkon 14y ago
    Two orders of magnitude (which isn't all that "many") would make that 2,400 people working on the Visual Studio shell. Although its likely there are many more than pictured, I can't imagine it being thousands.
    - sriramk 14y ago
      DevDiv (which makes up both Visual Studio, .NET and a bunch of other stuff) had ~5K people when I left. So very definitely possible. Also, I'm not sure what you mean by the 'shell'. VS is a huge beast and has dozens of components, several of them coming from outside the VS team.
    - city41 14y ago
      I worked on VS2010 on a team that provided functionality delivered inside the shell. It's very hard to say how many people actually work on VS as a whole, but it's a whole heck of a lot of people. Pretty much all of DevDiv has at least something to do with VS. Then there are teams outside of DevDiv that also contribute (such as mine, I was on a SQL Server team). I do agree the team responsible for the shell itself is probably not too big.

runako 14y ago

I am astonished that they shipped VS 2010 knowing that it took over 20 seconds after launch to start editing VB code. Kudos for the improvement, though.

adrr 14y ago
VS 2010 was a big turd of an IDE. I wonder how this version compares to VS.net 2008.
- beagle3 14y ago
  I feel everything since VC++6 (released 1998, if I'm not mistaken) has been going downhill. (I don't really like .net -- I'm referring primarily to the C++ IDE; and I also think the VB6 IDE is nicer than any VB.NET one)
  - photon137 14y ago
    ...has been going downhill. ...I'm referring primarily to the C++ IDE How, specifically?
    - beagle3 14y ago
      Snappiness is the thing that bothers me most: With VC6, on my machine in 2000: While debugging, I could press "F10", keep it pressed (to single step instructions), raise my finger when I get to the right place. It all worked instantly. Now, it feels like there's half a second response time to each one of those keypresses. While building, I could stop execution (Shift-F5) and restart (F5) in about 0.3 seconds if I didn't change any source file. VS 2010 takes about 3 seconds, on a really simple project, to figure out that it doesn't need to rebuild anything before starting. And then, it takes another second to actually start my code. WTF?
    - runako 14y ago
      11 seconds to start editing code, for starters. I don't remember VS6 being anywhere near that slow.

Rickasaurus 14y ago

I'm so excited about F# type providers I can't even put it into words. Strongly typed access directly into datasets is going to save me so much frickin time.

aaronbrethorst 14y ago

THE MENUS ARE STILL SCREAMING AT US, I REALLY WISH THEY'D CHANGED THAT BACK, SINCE IT MAKES IT A LOT HARDER TO READ. Edit: there are actually studies on this. See, for example, this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_caps#Readability http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_caps#Readability Edit 2: Also considering that, once upon a time, I was the Program Manager who would've owned implementation of this misfeature, I feel entitled to complain.

stephengillie 14y ago
Stupid question: Why can't we create skins for VS the way we used to skin Winamp?
sergiotapia 14y ago
Like you actually need to have readability for single word menu options. Stop nitpicking y tratando de buscarle cinco pies al gato.
jjcm 14y ago
I've been using it for the last 5 months or so. Honestly, it's 15 labels at the top, all of which I know the positioning of. They could be cryptic/obscure symbols from The 5th Element, and I'd still know what each one does based on their position. Yea, it takes a couple more seconds to parse the menus the first time you look at it, but after a while you memorize what they are anyway. If menu readability is the worst thing people can find about VS2012, then I'd say they did an OK job with it.
- MichaelGG 14y ago
  I don't think most people are honestly saying "oh dear, how will I ever find the Debug menu". They're objecting to an obviously annoying move with no clear rationale. The VS beta had an entirely different set of text in all caps. The fact that they had to hunt around capitalizing stuff in order to "Metro-ize" it just shows its mainly a political move. (Office 2013 has also gone the route of randomly capitalizing things; there is apparently no motivating rationale for which parts of the UI on a desktop app deserve caps.) Users are rightly annoyed that Microsoft's making these silly changes, and because they're so visible, of course there will be a lot of vocal feedback. A more cynical person might even think this was by design: Make one really prominent annoying feature, and drown out concerns on anything else.

highace 14y ago

I especially like the VS2012 web inspector - it's like having Firebug or Chrome Inspector plugged into the live code, html, and css, so any changes you make are saved.

sergiotapia 14y ago
This changes EVERYTHING.
- rodly 14y ago
  Are you being sarcastic? Low quality comment nonetheless. --- To parent of his comment, what do you mean exactly? Firebug already lets you change code and see the results immediately.
  - megaman821 14y ago
    Firebug doesn't sync the changes back to the original code.
    - rodly 14y ago
      Sync the changes to the source file? How would any client do that without write permissions? Or is that the point?
      - rjzzleep 14y ago
        you might want to take a look at https://github.com/adobe/brackets/ https://github.com/adobe/brackets/ can't say i'm particularly thrilled at the idea though
ConstantineXVI 14y ago
I know IDEA (IntelliJ, RubyMine, etc.) has an browser-tied debugger as well; haven't made much use of either for web dev so can't give a fair opinion on how they compare.

sergiotapia 14y ago

I've downloaded and used the RC and ran it on Windows 8 and I'm lovin' it. Great interface, the solutions explorer has a lot more built in options. The CSS features are superb, and MVC support is great. I'm really looking forward to it.

elktea 14y ago

There's some nice WPF features in the 4.5 release, it's a shame it seems to have been replaced with WinRT as the UI language of choice in Windows 8.

ConstantineXVI 14y ago

IIRC, the low-end ("Professional") MSVS 2010 outside of MSDN still came with some sort of basic access that got you the current Windows; does 2012 still have that? I don't see any mention of it on the store page.

rjzzleep 14y ago
afair 2012 only allows for windows 8 apps. for the rest youd probably have to use an older runtime with vs 2011 express.
- tedunangst 14y ago
  The currently available release of Express only supports Windows 8 (Metro) apps. The Pro version supports "desktop" apps, as does a supposedly forthcoming Express version.
  - usea 14y ago
    Currently I can build desktop apps without downloading VS at all. The compiler (csc.exe) and MSBuild come with the free Windows SDK. The libraries (System.Windows.Forms etc) come with .NET. How have they restricted this ability in 2012 express edition?
    - tedunangst 14y ago
      I don't know. I'm not running Windows 8, so all I can tell you is I read the web page and repeated what it said. Maybe they simply omitted the "create new project" button.

eswangren 14y ago

I just hope it's faster. VS has been getting noticeably slower with each release since 6. It's unbearable at times.

redact207 14y ago
Really? When was the last time you upgraded? It's been getting noticeably faster since 2008.
- modernshoggoth 14y ago
  Agree and disagree. At my last job I had 6, 2008 & 2010 all installed (legacy apps, yay). 6 was amazingly responsive but sucked if you had to read/write anything (like, say, compiling). 2008 was average-slow at everything. 2010 had a go-away-&-make-a-coffee startup time that pounded the HDD, but after that was VERY fast given the complexity of the jobs it was given.
- seanmcdirmid 14y ago
  I can't believe anyone could say this with a straight face when comparing VS2010 with VS2008. 2012 is much improved and almost feels as fast as 2008.
  - eswangren 14y ago
    I never used 2008, so I see why you might say that. I went from 6 -> 2005 -> 2010. 2010 is slow as a dog. 2005 is slower than 6.
berkut 14y ago
Updating intellisense!!
echion 14y ago
There are some actual numbers here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudio/archive/2012/07/16/improved-toolbox-performance-delivers-highly-responsive-visual-studio-2012.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudio/archive/2012/07/16/impr...

rbanffy 14y ago

Loved the HEY, YOU GUYS FORGOT #0: A FRIENDLY, SCREAM-CENTRIC UI, READY TO SHOUT AT EVERY DIRECTION HOW MUCH IT LOVES YOU. THANKS, I FEEL LIKE USING COBOL AGAIN! comment.

jiggy2011 14y ago

Wow, that's an ugly UI. And this is coming from somebody who uses Eclipse. Visual Studio was nice because it always felt "cosy" and fitted very nicely into Windows. I'm not even sure what this looks like, is it supposed to be Metro? Reminds me more of Java Swing. The lack of any embossing or clear separation on icons/menus looks like it's going to difficult to mouse with.

modarts 14y ago

WHAT'S UP WITH THE ALL CAPS MENU?