

Visual Studio 2012 and .NET Framework 4.5 released - cygwin98
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jasonz/archive/2012/08/15/visual-studio-2012-and-net-framework-4-5-released-to-the-web.aspx

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aaronbrethorst
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>

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.

~~~
jjcm
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.

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MichaelGG
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.

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jiggy2011
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.

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Rickasaurus
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.

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runako
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
VS 2010 was a big turd of an IDE. I wonder how this version compares to VS.net
2008.

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beagle3
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)

~~~
malbs
"the VB6 IDE is nicer than any VB.NET one"

I can think of a couple of items right off the bat..

\- no mouse wheel support \- code navigation shortcut keys non-existant \- ide
crashed all the time \- I can't think of anything else really because it's
been so long I was forced to want to kill myself (translation: It's been a
while since I had to use the VB6 toolset)

I would argue you never spent any serious time in the VB6 ide, because it was
(is) complete garbage. The fact that people still use it proves to me that
those people simply don't know any better.

And if you throw the argument that VB6 is great for just banging out windows
apps that work, Delphi is a far better choice.

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abolibibelot
The upside of the VB6 IDE, used on a recent computer is that it's amazingly
fast and snappy (it was meant to run on 1998's PC's).

That's what I kept telling myself when I had to work on a legacy 600k LoC VB
codebase last year. If you ever find yourself in the same situation, use the
first paragraph as a mantra to keep your sanity.

~~~
beagle3
It was fast and snappy back in 1998 too. Much faster and snappier than Studio
2010 in 2010.

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sergiotapia
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.

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cygwin98
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.

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walkon
Possibly just the VS team without any .NET and language teams.

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sriramk
The VS team is many orders of magnitude than what you see there. I suspect
that those are just the release PMs.

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walkon
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.

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city41
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.

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ryanmolden
>I do agree the team responsible for the shell itself is probably not too big.

The shell team has 5 developers (6 now, as a new one started a few weeks ago).
5 QA members and 2 PMs (actually, I think 3 now, one just started in Haifa, I
haven't met him yet and don't know too much of what he is working on).

What each team is specifically responsible for is hard to say as it can change
when re-orgs happen. Though the shell team owns a lot of the core
functionality of VS like the windowing system, the command system, and some
common windows (like the solution explorer, the output window, the error
list/task list, the toolbox, probably a slew of others I don't know about :))

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elktea
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.

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highace
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.

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sergiotapia
This changes EVERYTHING.

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rodly
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.

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megaman821
Firebug doesn't sync the changes back to the original code.

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rodly
Sync the changes to the source file? How would any client do that without
write permissions? Or is that the point?

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rjzzleep
you might want to take a look at <https://github.com/adobe/brackets/>

can't say i'm particularly thrilled at the idea though

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barefoot
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.

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weazl
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.

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ConstantineXVI
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.

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rjzzleep
afair 2012 only allows for windows 8 apps. for the rest youd probably have to
use an older runtime with vs 2011 express.

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tedunangst
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.

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usea
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?

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tedunangst
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.

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guilloche
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.

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freehunter
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!"

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modarts
WHAT'S UP WITH THE ALL CAPS MENU?

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

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redact207
Really? When was the last time you upgraded? It's been getting noticeably
faster since 2008.

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seanmcdirmid
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.

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eswangren
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.

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rbanffy
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.

