I'm sorry, but I use color to locate things. This, to me, is a disaster. If this isn't a problem for other people, fine, but it's a problem to me. A better solution would have been to use less color and desaturated tones rather than simply going to full on black and white, which serves only to rob the IDE of potential visual cues. This is like using a cannon to kill a bird. Just because they overcolorized VS2010 for no apparent reason doesn't mean they need to overcompensate in the opposite direction. I can't use this until someone comes up with color-based icons for it.
Agreed. I use colours and shapes to at-a-glance distinguish between icons. If there are more than two or three icons two similarly coloured side-by-side, I find it pretty hard to tell them apart without having to think about it.
Completely agree. The new design looks horrible. It seems they've removed any use of shading/colour to let you know whats happening to not 'overload the user'.
Just reducing the contrast would have been enough. And if there wasn't a direct comparison between the coloured icons and the b/w ones, I would have no idea what the b/w ones would do.
I work everyday writing code for iOS apps using VS. I write code and compile, run unit tests, etc... in VS. I then use the same project and source files, load them into MonoDevelop and compile using MonoTouch on my Mac to generate native apps.
This is not true. You _can_ develop programs that only work on Windows, but you can also choose your technologies carefully and make .NET programs that work on Mono. you can code stuff targeting other languages and so on.
It's developer's choice whether or not to code portable.
So...you're wrong on most accounts. VS 2010 is plenty fast and plenty of people build plenty of cross platform apps and web apps using Visual Studio.
Honestly, I think you should really just consider checking your attitude and your politics at the door because hating Microsoft and all that "ghastly" proprietary software is just so passe. It's boring and nobody cares that you think proprietary software is evil.
fast is a relative term. If we're talking about VS 2010, then it's fast versus building an IDE with ed on your own.
Honestly, I think you should really just consider checking your attitude and your politics at the door because loving Microsoft and all that proprietary software is just so old-school. It's boring and nobody cares that you think free software is evil.
Well, our Windows builds may just have to move from 2005 to 2010 and plan to be stuck there for the forseeable future.
I was hoping I could use a C++11 compiler for Windows development someday. But it's probably more likely that I'll stop developing for Windows before my company's customers stop running XP.
2010 builds them OK. You can also look at mingw with g++ if you want to try some of the C++11 features on Windows XP. I was surprised to hear that MS did this. XP is still widely used in industry and is a good baseline platform to target.
It is not "insane", XP is three years past the end of official support and only two years until the end of extended support. It's two generations old and possibly three by the time this is released.
I know you mean to point out how old and crufty XP is (and that is true), but if you stop and think about it... it's really a testament to C++ and Microsoft engineering that it has done so well for so long.
That said: XP will eventually fade off, but not because of MS official support or extended or whatever. It will fade because end users will eventually stop installing and using it.
Our company only recently started the full roll out of Windows 7, and some computers still require Windows XP (for accounting applications).
These few computers will use Windows XP for the foreseeable future, official support or not.
And they can still use previous versions of VS to develop with XP. It won't stop working, it will gradually fade to governments and big businesses with inertia and businesses who don't want to pay to upgrade.
Then to smaller and smaller niches.
I'm not saying it should die, or it is bad, but that it is old and new tools are not 'insane' to not support it. IE9 came out almost a year ago and doesn't support XP, for example. DirectX vNext in Vista isn't XP compatible.
I'll go out on a limb here and predict that XP extended support will itself be extended. There are simply too many desktops out there using it to be ignored.
According to: http://gs.statcounter.com/#os-ww-monthly-201101-201201 XP dropped 14% in the last year, and is now on 34%. So a really dumb calculation says about 2 and a half years if that keeps up, but I guess there will be a longer tail of die-hard users... hard to tell, since it's pretty unprecedented for a particular version of a major OS to be so popular for so long.
Microsoft stops providing XP security patches in April 2014. Any organization that wants to use XP after that will need to pay Microsoft to maintain support. Any organization that continues to use XP without support is irresponsible.
"One big thing that works against us having any sort of nice workaround for this, is the fact that as of Visual C++ 2010, the CRT and MFC rebuild makefiles are no longer included with the source code. In 2008 and earlier, it was so easy to rebuild CRT and MFC DLLs because there was a clear set of makefiles included. Now all there is, is a silly "these are the compiler and linker switches we use, go find your own solution to rebuild these" web page."
It's also not something that would take them work to do, as the older library versions already implemented the code paths needed for Windows 2000 and XP.
I suspect MS wants the support for older OS-es banned to make new apps unrunable on Wine too.
Interesting thing about VS and Xcode is that they do not really try to compete with somebody or fight for attention. Both Windows and Mac/iOS developers would use less useful tools if they still let them make products for the popular platforms. JetBrains, Borland and others are fighting for attention and developers' love. They must try really-really hard to make people choose an alternative to the official tools.
So both MS and Apple teams may focus on what is "right" and avoid feature bloat in UI, avoid quick and dirty solutions etc. Yes, they must include some features quickly and efficiently to allow support for some new APIs in the new products. But the overall design and fit and finish is free to define however they want. They can spend time making it right and redoing it how they please. They have resources and expertise for that and they don't need be in a stressing "competition" mood.
I'm really disappointed by what Microsoft did with Visual Studio. They have great technology - great language, great compiler support and integration with editors. But the way it is all presented and organized is all boring mess of panels and tons of icons. They even understand all the icons are heavy for eyes, but instead of rethinking the design, they simply ask "40 existing and 36 new VS users" how do they like monochrome versions.
Apple's Xcode 3 was also a messy window/panel cluttered tool like many others. Many still considered it lighter than any other complex IDE, but it was fairly cluttered on its own. Next version, Xcode 4 was not designed by "asking developers". Developers want a pink pony and all the features in one click. Xcode 4 was designed. They made priorities and straightened UI so much it is now Plain Straight. One window, three panes, 7 buttons on toolbar. Just by learning a single screenshot with both sidebars opened, you already know how to navigate 80% of the time. It is crucial. You don't have to read huge manual to learn more and more useful things. They all are discoverable over time. Most important things are more visible, others are discovered over time.
Apple and Microsoft are rarely in position to throw old stuff out and replace it with brand new in their actual products that make money. Windows, Mac, iOS all have its legacy which must be dealt with. But UI for developer tools are different and Microsoft has no excuse not to make it interesting. Unless, of course, they don't want to maintain their own engineering culture.
It isn't clear if you meant to imply that Apple has made better decisions with Xcode. If that is what you are saying, I firmly disagree. This isn't meant to imply that MS is better. Having said that, I don't mind complexity in UI for professional tools. I've been programming for longer than a lot of people on this list have been alive (an assumption on my part). You learn the tool you have to use and move on. No big deal.
I have problems with dumb-ass decisions that make your job harder. Like compilers that don't accept /a/path/that has/spaces/in the string/. Or the absolutely dumb-founding way Xcode does not let you organize your files in a real file structure, you know, with directories and stuff, in the file system. Or how hard Xcode makes it to create use and maintain code libraries. I don't need my IDE to look and act like an iTunes clone. Thank you very much. Pretty doesn't matter to me. Easy and incredibly flexible and functional does. I mean, take the way they've absolutely ruined documentation access in Xcode 4 when compared to Xcode 3. True to iTunes style, the Organizer is overloaded with all kinds of crap it probably shouldn't do.
Anyhow, no tool is perfect, but there are salient examples of the less-than-perfect even in 2012.
I have clarified my point in another comment already. It's not about who's better. It's about who's trying to experiment and rethink things. In developer tools team of the top-10 tech company you have a great combo: best hard-core engineers on the planet + little need to maintain cruft and worry about competition. Why not experiment and try to be better at what you do? Xcode 4 is this radical attempt to improve old problems (of course introducing new ones). And VS does not try to eliminate old obvious problems and almost stays where it is in terms of UI.
> Why not experiment and try to be better at what you do?
Herein lies the problem. The term "better" is most definitely subjective.
Not to pic on Xcode, but this is a prime example of focusing too much on making a consumer appliance rather than a professional tool. Like I said: I don't want iTunes, I want a kick-ass IDE.
I'm in the middle of a project that has, quite literally, thousands of assets to manage (images, audio, video). The thousands of files end-up piled-up without any semblance of organization in the project directory. I mean, who woke up one day and though "This is a good idea!" when you have a perfectly good file system to take advantage of? Updating assets is an absolute nightmare.
Yes, yes, there are crafty work-arounds. Each with its own pros-and-cons. The point is that the IDE itself was designed to totally ignore the underlying file system. Let's put it this way: If I wrote code like that at the many jobs I've had over the years I would have gotten fired in a microsecond. Yet, for some reason, this is "feature" is now considered good design?
The key was "try". Xcode is far from being focused on "consumers" and they are trying hard to make a kick-ass IDE. It could be a different definition of "kick-ass" from yours, that's fine.
Anyway, I emphasize this again: it's not a question if the actual result is better or worse, it's a complex question because there are thousands of people to evaluate it. The question is why not to experiment more where you have more liberty to do so. It's hard to experiment with a toolbar in Excel because millions of non-computer-geek users are used to certain operations and want to preserve their productivity. But it's not hard to throw away toolbar in an IDE because nobody will pay you less because of it. (Especially if you are actually trying to do your best.)
Metro after Windows is that kind of experiment (but way more risky and rewarding, of course). But Visual Studio is not inspiring at all after all these years.
PS. For that matter, Xcode 4 is not radical enough too. We are still typing a lot of boring cruft (even with ever-smarter autocompletion). But it's a huge difference with Xcode 3 and other IDEs out there.
>It's hard to experiment with a toolbar in Excel because millions of non-computer-geek users
Excel is another of my favorite "Why did they do that?" examples. In my opinion, MS absolutely ruined Excel somewhere in the transition from Office 2003 to 2007. If you were a power user with Excel'03 you felt like a total idiot with Excel'07. And, this wasn't a matter of a few buttons here and there. The thing was almost utterly unusable compared to what you could do with the '03 version. Furthermore, they complicated the usage of VBA modules. If you had a library of VBA work that you used regularly you, all of a sudden, found yourself scratching your head trying to figure out how to do some pretty basic stuff.
I use Excel extensively for automated code generation. Simple examples are the generation of repetitive lookup table code in various languages. Or code to pre-stuff database tables. Or maintaining a complex LUT-driven state machine. I have custom Excel tools that have taken months to develop that do increase productivity in a measurable way. For example, one tool uses Excel to auto-magically write the code (LUT, callbacks, etc.) for a menu system on an embedded device with an LCD display. Before the tool it'd take hours, if not a couple of days, to maintain. After the custom VBA tool it was a matter of minutes.
Anyhow, upon switching to '07 (mostly a forced switch because I needed to migrate to a 64 bit OS for Finite Element Analysis work) I went from light speed to crawling. That, to me, is not an improvement. I am OK with learning new things, you have to be open to it if you want to remain in this game, but sometimes you can't help but scratch your head and try to figure out what the hell they were thinking.
Thankfully that was easily solved with a VM running XP and Excel'03.
I use Excel extensively for automated code generation.
I'm not going to argue if this is a good thing or a bad thing to do, but even you have to agree that this is an extremely rare thing to do, and something that would be more or less impossible for Microsoft to anticipate you doing.
Of course. This was just one illustration of Excel as an augmentation tool. There are probably thousands of such special applications out there, some commercial, some not, that used Excel this way.
The greater point, perhaps, is that making things prettier at the expense of raw functionality isn't always the best idea.
For the record, on first inspection I like the outer appearance of VS 2011. I like the pictographic icons and clean uncluttered appearance. I hope that this effort did not come at the expense of function elsewhere. We'll upgrade when it comes out of beta and see.
I will argue, as I don't know who the submitter is, or even what this site is. HackerNews I think? I just got here via a Twitter post. So I have nothing to lose.
If you're using Excel for automated code generation, YOU'RE DOING IT WRONG
Surely there are better tools out there for the task.
That's really funny partner. Using Excel for generating code fragments that can be cut and pasted into your compiler is powerful and fast. Nothing wrong with it. But, go ahead and don't. I love compete with others doing thing less efficiently. Makes me smile.
May I humbly suggest that you are mixing your data up with your code? Could you not just put the data in an external Excel file (or *.txt file, whatever) and read that in when you run your code?
This has a number of advantages:
- you don't need to change your code every time the data changes.
- you can version the data and the code seperately within your source control management system.
- you don't need to write any VBA. (always a winner, that one)
- current developers will be able to understand and change the code without being forced to use the macro you developed, or have it explained to them.
- future developers will be able to understand where all the code came from, and be able to effectively understand and change it.
- you will be less affected by changes to future versions of Excel.
He mentioned generating code for an embedded system. In that particular situation what you suggest may not be possible.
On the other hand what would be possible (and I've done this a few times before) is write a program or script (I like writing it in Python) that takes the .xls/.csv/.txt/.json file (which is pure data, can be edited in many programs etc) and generates the C/C++/whatever code from that. Basically the best of both worlds.
I couldn't agree more. '07 excel is a major change from '03. I know that they are trying more of a shotgun approach to reach deeper into business but I'm not sure if MS considered how they have alienated the power users. '10 is much more SharePoint focused which I love but SharePoint out of the box is very very limited.
Dunno about 03 but I recently installed Office XP (2002) almost without pb on a Windows 7 64bits. The only pb was with the companion help API that doesn't exist anymore on Vista/7 but is downloadable as a hotfix from Microsoft.
So I'm perplex about the need of a VM to run Excel 03 and won't debate about the use of it to generate code as anyone have different habits for his workflow.
>PS. For that matter, Xcode 4 is not radical enough too. We are still typing a lot of boring cruft ... But it's a huge difference with Xcode 3 and other IDEs out there.
I can only conclude that you have absolutely no concrete experience of the state of other tools and languages. Eclipse, IntelliJ and Visual Studio with Resharper are lightyears ahead of XCode 4 when it comes to assisted programming.
Here's the clue: all of these tools expose the code DOM to tool writers. Even if Intellij didn't have over 100 different ways to refactor code, I could write my own. Fuck, I wrote a Resharper plugin that loaded javascript file to manipulate the dom and pass it to StringTemplate [1] The javascript file then decides based on what is at the cursor which templates to display when the user hits Alt-Enter. Think for a minute about what has to happen under the hood for that to happen. Then think what else is possible. Then realize that its not there in XCode 4.
This is more due to a language/API design flaw, actually. When a program (a preprocessor, a part of the IDE) generates more code starting from the code you actually wrote, it's because, for some reason, whatever you expressed in your code could not express enough to build the whole application.
XCode 4 may have been designed but it wasn't designed well. It has no mixed source/disassembly views. Hovering over the debug icons say that pressing control and clicking "step into" will step a single instruction. But this isn't a sticky setting, so if I press control and click "step into" twice, the first time will step an instruction and the second will perform a source line step.
It also crashes. A lot.
When doing iOS development I find myself switching between GDB and LLDB regularly, as LLDB gives some great context information but it crashes and takes out all of Xcode on a fairly regular basis.
Xcode is terrible. It's really quite sad that a company that prides itself as much as Apple does on its user experience is able to let something so unusable out its doors. Xcode 3 may have been messy but it was many times more usable because it was many times more stable than Xcode 4. I don't really care how pretty my tool interfaces are but rather how well they work.
But it isn't encouraging that they'd push the release out with what seems to be blatant crashes. It sort of feels like the developers are left out to dry and they have to soldier on. Personally, I rely on git to make sure I don't screw up my project/code to the point where the IDE crashes repeatably. And that's unacceptable.
It's called integrity. And although XCode has it from a design sense, it doesn't appear to have it in the engineering department.
Most programmers fall into one of two categories: console editor (e.g. vim) or IDE. The IDE camp includes Visual Studio, Eclipse, IntelliJ, SlickEdit, NetBeans, MonoDevelop, etc.
These IDEs have an almost identical design language. I am at home in any of them and picking up new ones is pretty straightforward.
XCode 4 on the other hand has a completely different design language, and one that is limited in what it can do, but verbose in achieving it.
Limited, for example, because while I have a 17" MBP and a 23" monitor, I can't have the Project Navigator open at the same time as the Error Navigator. I can't view code and disassembly. I can't have code side-by-side in a split view.
Verbose, for example, because when editing a Scheme, it opens a custom, modal dialog, and if I press "Manage Schemes..." it rolls up and then rolls down another custom, modal dialog. If I then hit "+" it opens another modal dialog on top of my modal dialog. I thought we got rid of this kind of shit with VB6.
I've built a complicated IDE or two, and every time there was a custom, modal dialog, it was because we were rushed for time. Good non-modal design requires thought and effort. Flexible UI requires thought and effort. A simple, powerful design language requires thought and effort.
I would put money on XCode 4 not so much being "designed" as "rushed". Or perhaps "designed with lofty goals" - and one of those being "not like any other IDE, so that programmers learning on XCode will be completely thrown by any other tool".
Many changes in Xcode 4 seem to have been made entirely for cosmetic reasons. The default error list pane on the left hand side, for instance, cuts off 80% of the error message text. Jetbrains' AppCode UI may not look as much like an iTunes clone but it seems to have been designed with developer productivity as top priority.
Example of throwing away old cruft: Xcode 4 did not (and I guess still does not) support Interface Builder plugins. Meaning, you have to add third-party UI components in code rather than with mouse in a visual editor. But integrating IB into the rest of workflow was decided to be more important.
Now, I'm not arguing it was right decision. My point is that both Apple and MS can afford making such decisions without effect on profits. If JetBrains throws away a feature, their sales drop. How much less Macs, Xboxes or Windows copies would have been sold if some convenience features were removed from or drastically changed in a developer tool?
I personally think that Microsoft should stick with things that only Microsoft can do, and leave the more cutting-edge innovations to others.
Example: the test automation tools into Visual Studio were terrible. Maybe they still are, I don't know, I've stopped using them. nUnit is just better. Their automated refactoring stuff may be OK, but the stuff from JetBrains is much, much better. Don't get me started on Team Frustration Server.
If they want to simplify and clean up their UI by starting with lower contrast icons to make the IDE background and the code foreground, that's totally a step in the right direction.
> the test automation tools into Visual Studio were terrible
It went from "just plain bad" in VS2008 to "horribly awful" in VS2010. So awful that someone at MS named the process that manages the unit testing "QTAgent", so that when your machine slowed to a crawl and you opened the Task Manager to see what was wrong you'd see "QT" and conclude it was a background update issue with Apple QuickTime.
Microsoft (either explicitly or de-facto) owns the Common Language Runtime, the C# language, Entity Framework, ASP.NET, IIS, Windows OS, Windows Phone OS, XBOX, XBOX live, etc.
An example that I think of is LINQ (not linq-to-sql, mind you, but the language-integrated query stuff). So many things were required to make LINQ viable in the language and the tools, etc. that it doesn't seem realistic to expect an external dev team to throw something like that together. That stands in contrast to things like test automation, which nUnit had already been doing very well for years before Visual Studio tried to get into it.
I'm really not sure any of those is something only Microsoft could do, much less in the restricted scope of development tools.
When you say "that it doesn't seem realistic to expect an external dev team to throw something like that together", you are giving Microsoft's internal teams a power they simply don't have outside their very narrow zone of influence, as there is a lot of stuff being done outside it.
It seems smart to just clean up rather than alienate their users with radical and risky changes. People just want to code... Not learn a new interface to code...
Maybe it's just me but I like the "Strong use of color" better. I find it hard to quickly find the tool button I want when they're all monochrome. I'm sure I'd get used to it, but I can't really say the colors in the GUI are my primary distraction when I'm coding...
Some of us grognards would argue that if you're having trouble finding buttons, they really shouldn't be on the screen at all. Seriously, why must IDEs look like this? Why is there screen space dedicated to documentation when I'm not reading docs?
Why are there multiple horizontal bars at both the top and bottom of the full-screen display when the single most important activity in the app is scanning very long text files often dozens of times "higher" than the screen. Seriously, every line of text is precious, why must we steal them from the editor with a title bar and a menu bar and a tool bar (thankfully they now have only one toolbar) and a tab bar and a status bar. Why does anyone think this is a good design?
I'm no longer a .NET developer. But I was for about a decade and I got to the point that I removed all toolbars from Visual Studio. I had nothing but the text editor and solution explorer (docked and only opened when needed). I'm surprised to read many comments here where people talk about finding icons and getting lost in the toolbars. Power uses of tools like Vim, Photoshop, Illustrator, etc use the keyboard for everything, I'd have thought most VS power users do that too.
I think most VS power users do that as well. I honestly can't remember the last time I clicked an icon on the toolbar.
One of the really nice things about pair programming is the number of times I've started hunting through a menu for an option and the other dev will say "Oh, just hit <chord>".
If you spend a great deal of time in ANY application you owe it to yourself to take one day a month and force yourself to use it without ever clicking a menu or icon. You'll be delighted at how much more productive you'll be.
I no longer have VS available to check. Is that "no chrome mode" or really just "fullscreen" mode? I seem to remember this mode made alt-tabbing to other apps problematic for some reason. Maybe I'm wrong. I also never maximize my windows, which I believe is another reason I didn't like this mode.
You're right, it's fullscreen, I actually didn't entirely realize this. (I was sort of thinking of OneNote which has its own "full window for content" toggle which isn't fullscreen)
Windows in VS10 behave oddly in general around alt-tab and other things, I haven't managed to form a mental model of how/why they do.
I've used Qt Creator only once or twice, but my memory (and the handful of screenshots I see on google image search) is that it's pretty much the same. An editor rectangle embedded in a bunch of other crap with way too much vertical space above and below it dedicated to things that aren't very important.
For reference, my emacs window has the gnome 3 panel and the window manager title bar as waste and that's it. And for years I ran a custom metacity theme which turned off the title bars entirely (haven't managed to port that to gnome shell yet).
I think your recollection/search is incorrect. Qt Creator has a menu bar, navigation bar, and output selector etc. bar, all the height of a single line of text. There are no toolbars at all - none that can even be turned on. Much of the status and control interface is in a vertical bar on the left.
A typical session looks like this [1]. With the documentation window open, it looks like this [2]. The GUI designer looks like this [3] (there's also a second "designer" for Qt Quick). The debugger looks like this [4]. With the compile log/error log/search results window open, it looks like this [5]. About 80% of the time, when I use Qt Creator, especially if I'm not developing a GUI application (in which case I also use the designer), my screen looks like [1].
On the other hand, to my eyes at least, most other IDE's look something like this [6], [7] or very very extreme cases [8]. That is, they lose a lot of vertical space to tool bars.
When I'm developing on Linux and I'm not developing a Qt GUI application in C++, I use a mixture of text-mode vim, geany and gedit in a tiling window manager (that is, the "dock windows" in most IDEs are windows that I have tiled, or vim panels) with no window borders or decorations whatsoever [9].
Wait, what? You use four different editors? How can you stand that? How could you be good at any of them? I can barely type into a text field on a web page without pasting from emacs.
I don't use vim on windows. On linux, I use geany for Python code and plain text. Sometimes I also use gedit, but its rare. I use Qt Creator for all Qt development and for non-Qt C++ development if I'm not using linux.
So, most of the time I'm using Qt Creator, some of the time I use geany and the rest I use vim. I probably sholdn't have mentioned gedit as I really don't use it often. I'm planning on dumping geany in favour of vim next time I have to set up my development environment (basically when I get a new laptop, hopefully real soon) as I've been meaning to practice my vim skills for a while now. I was real good at it a few years ago, but then I got a little rusty, which is why I ended up using geany for python and plain text instead...
Actually, to be completely accurate, I use MPLAB too ;) I use it exclusively to program C for the PIC24 microcontrollers. I also used Notepad++ for AVR development a few months ago - if I had been developing on linux, I would have used vim, but I really dislike gvim, so do not use it on windows. I use MPLAB for PIC development because it integrates with the hardware programmer, the remote debugger and saves having to set up paths for a gcc thats not compatible with the one I use for desktop C++ development (though I plan on switching to clang, so I won't have any gcc clashes anymore then).
As someone who's an IDE "beginner" (I usually code in Vim, recently started using IDEA) in my opinion there's nothing at all about this that "helps beginners get going". Instead of having a useful toolbar with a few of the most common operations on it I have a double or triple stacked bar with dozens of icons, panels coming from every side, etc.
It's basically impossible to find even the easiest of IDE functions in that mess. One of the purported advantages of GUIs is the discoverability of the interface. When I have to visually search through hundreds of UI elements to find what I need, that is all lost.
The monolithic IDE concept really needs a fresh breath of air. I do like the fact that they come with a lot of integrated tools for a programming environment, but they shouldn't clutter the UI because of it. Ideally I think an IDE would start off looking mostly like a text editor and give you clearly delineated views of different activities once you need them.
In VS 11 we have transitioned to glyph style iconography throughout the product. While we understand that opinions on this new style of iconography may vary, an icon recognition study conducted with 76 participants, 40 existing and 36 new VS users, showed no negative effect in icon recognition rates for either group due to the glyph style transition. In the case of the new VS users they were able to successfully identify the new VS 11 icons faster than the VS 2010 icons (i.e., given a command, users were faster at pointing to the icon representing that command). In this and subsequent studies more developers have expressed a preference for the glyph style icons over the former style, especially after having spent time getting used to the new glyph style icons.
That's great, except the test is not taking into account my personal preference. I don't use the icons very much to do things - I mostly use keyboard shortcuts. Now, I'm going to be stuck looking at that garbage all day.
Furthermore...76 participants? That doesn't prove anything.
And also people who somehow know that a UI without colors (or some other moronic, one-size-fits-all idea) is a good thing for every other user on Earth, for ever and ever, Amen.
These are some nice concepts, but this is entirely overbaked (in my opinion).
I don't find the colors of VS2k10 "distracting" me or making it "difficult" to find things at all. I am glad, however, they're removing a bunch of those useless buttons by default (of course you can always remove them yourself, but I digress).
I can appreciate what they're attempting here, but why go this far without a road back? If you're going to completely overhaul the look and feel this much, and go so far as to let people choose between 2 different color schemes, why not at least give people the option of using the classic scheme, or allow for custom user developed schemes (which would invariably give rise to a few "classic" ones anyways). Maybe they mentioned this and I missed it... I hope thats the case.
I've always felt the U/I got better with each iteration since the original VS, but this is the first time I'm not excited to get my hands on the next version based solely on the look and feel.
Of course, I'll have to reserve final judgement for when I actually get my hands on it.
IMO, they need to distinguish between places where icons are peripheral "chrome" and places where the icons actually represent what in the context of how you are using them is effectively "content" that you care about.
e.g. it makes sense for the standard toolbar buttons at the top to be de-emphasized (and for there to be fewer of them, bravo!) as the vast majority of the time they're on screen, I care about my code and not about the toolbar buttons. It doesn't make sense for the GUI controls available in Toolbox, for example, to "fade into the background" - presumably if I have the Toolbox open, the available controls are something I care about. Or if they're not, why is the Toolbox there taking a third of the screen? If you ever have a situation where two-thirds of the screen are consumed by "de-emphasized monochromatic chrome", you're probably doing it wrong - if they're not important you need to figure out how to reduce their physical screen presence, if they're important you can / should give them a more distinctive presentation.
> I've always felt the U/I got better with each iteration since the original VS, but this is the first time I'm not excited to get my hands on the next version based solely on the look and feel.
I feel the same about Windows 8. These products are ugly. I am deeply concerned about the direction Microsoft has taken.
100% agree. If this is what they spent time on, as opposed to the fact that, say, 'find' is dog-slow and doesn't reliably cancel, or that copy/paste randomly stops working, or that it has a tendency to hang several times a day... well, I just don't understand the priorities.
You can already set (and share) color schemes for what really matters- the code editor. As long as I get to keep my editor colors, I'm sure it will be no big deal to get used to any changes to the chrome.
Yea, but that's not really what I'm talking about.
I mean purely the shell of the U/I - Although it would be good if both of those things were configurable in the same way, so you could truly share a completely customized and tuned color scheme
Let me tell you that each compiler manufacturer has a different dictionary to look up the meaning of 'mostly'.
If a standard is not 100% implemented across compilers, no one can be sure to use it if portability is a concern.
This is exactly like the time where most databases 'mostly' implemented the SQL '92 standard, and then the code had to be full with DB specific workarounds.
Have you? Real question - I'd be very interested in that.
The list of (allegedly) fully compliant compilers is not very impressive (IBM, PGI, Sun), but in practice, you're aiming at C99 support to the level of GCC, which will get you - in addition to GCC and its (supposedly) drop-in replacement Clang - AMD and Intel (I think ICC has C99 support to GCC level, but there are probably discrepancies in the feature sets)...
In many of our projects we are not able to use GCC and are forced to use the official vendor's compiler for the platform.
So it might be not that easy for certain companies to use your suggestion.
As far for what 'mostly' means. I have been coding since the K&R days, so I am aware that even when things are supposed to be 100% the same among C compilers, reality speaks otherwise.
A lot of the C99 features like array initialization got sucked into C++11, and since the C "compiler" in MSVC is the C++ compiler, I think you'll probably get most of C99 for free.
If only that were true - however, some of the more interesting C99 and C11 features aren't part of C++11 as there are already C++ specific alternatives.
Also, MS doesn't really have a good track record of backporting C++ features to C (mixing code and declarations, anyone?).
If you want to write portable C code that works on at least *nix and Windows, either ignore MSVC (GCC works just fine on Windows via MinGW or Cygwin cross-compiler, as does Clang once you get it set up), or restrict yourself to the common subset of C99 and C++98...
They have explicitly stated that they have no interest in supporting C99, because they don't believe their users are asking for it, or their users would rather have new C++ features than new C features.
Sure it looks all pretty, but have they made it faster and more reliable?
VS2010 is just damn slow and falls over on me at least 2-3 times a day which is not acceptable. When you pay for 25 VS2010 premium licenses with MSDN on top of your gold partner allowance, you expect it to work.
VS2010 is just damn slow and falls over on me at least 2-3 times a day which is not acceptable.
Non-aggressive suggestion: think you've got something screwy with your system, I've had VS Fall over on my 2-3 times in the last several years of heavy use. It doesn't have to be that unstable. Also, with an SSD and enough RAM, I don't feel like I'm ever waiting on VS anymore.
I'd second that. In the past five years (or at least since VS 2008), I can remember VS crashing on me maybe half a dozen times. That's with spending most of my time working on pretty large multi language projects.
For context, I don't use any extensions other than (sometimes) ReSharper and Tortoise svn/git/hg.
I do C++ work. VS2010 is so slow and crashes so often for me that I abandoned it (and, sadly, its limited C++0x support) for VS2008. This is on a Core2Duo, 8G RAM, a hybrid hard drive, and accelerated graphics.
I was pretty happy with VS2008 until the other day, when I found that I can reliably crash it by opening a particular XML file. sigh
Speed is fine here and I generally enjoy working with VS 10 when I'm on Windows (showing errors while typing is a fantastic feature which I haven's seen for c++ before VS10). But my annoying VS 10 bug is that approximately once per week it simply refuses rebuilding a changed c++ file until I clean and rebuild the whole project. It just continues using the old object file despite having c++ files with a newer date - and what makes this really annoying is that this is a bug you certainly only notice after a while when results just stop making sense. Others in the project have the same trouble - maybe we messed up some setting, but we haven't found any setting yet about simply ignoring source-changes...
Try adding a semicolon in your source files immediately after your includes:
#include "stdio.h"
#include "system.h"
;
int StartOfYourCPPCode()
{
There's a long-standing bug with pre-compiled headers and code regeneration that (apparently) Microsoft has never fixed. There were (still are?) so many obscure issues with PCH that I just disabled it altogether.
Thanks. We also had suspected pre-compiled headers and also just disabled them completely, but unfortunately that wasn't it. I'll try adding a semicolon next time it happens to check if that changes something.
I blame XAML, and I'm justified. Some of my teammates here have changed Visual Studio to open XAML files with the XML editor, which means
* Visual Studio no longer crashes all the time, and
* they lose all XAML intellisense.
I choose to keep the XAML editor for its usefulness, but I run Task Manager (well, Process Explorer) open in the tray at all times to monitor my CPU. If your CPU spikes while you're doing nothing, it's a good sign that Visual Studio may crash.
And as everyone else says, it's rock-solid while doing web development or anything not involving XAML.
Do you use a lot of extensions? I have it crash about that much as well. I wonder if we compared extensions if we could pin point which one is causes the crashes.
Someone over there has clearly been reading tufte although I think in some cases (the new all gray icons) they've gone overboard.
Overall the strategy of moving the interface into the background and the content you're building into the foreground is great. I want my eyes drawn to what I'm building not 50 other ui elements. The metro style icons IMO are a bit hard to distinguish from eachother but anything I used regularly I'd have a keyboard shortcut for anyway and the new command search handles the rest. I think they're on the right track.They're minimizing any mental activity that's taking focus away from actually coding and that's a good thing.
I might be an old fart (close to 20 years of Windows programming), but all I see is bloat. A compiler, a linker, a debugger. An editor with syntax highlighting, Ctrl-F and Ctrl-H. That's it, this is pretty much all that I ever use in VS. Even plausibly useful features like Intellisense and IDE macros end up being more of a hindrance than a help.
What am I missing? What is there in the remaining 80% of VS that I am not using that is of practical value? Serious question.
Go to definition, Find all references, and variable rename are far superior to ctrl-f and ctrl-h because they operate on symbols rather than strings. When you highlight a variable and ctrl-f for it, you're going to find the 30 times the function is used (if it's even in the same file), whereas hitting f12 takes you right to the definition of it. Symbol renaming is much safer, since you don't have to worry about renaming "i" to "itemIndex" when a loop gets more complicated, and having misc things blow up in your face. Intellisense is really great when you're not entirely sure what order parameters go in, since it shows you what's important as you're typing. I've found them extremely valuable when working on large projects with multiple team members, since a lot of the times I won't have worked on the functions I'm calling to know them intimately.
Tangentially related: even in the redesign they manage to represent the save action using a floppy disk of all things.
I wonder whether that is ever going to change as people forget what floppys were or whether this will just be the canonical icon for save even far into the future when nobody will really know that the icon does indeed have its roots in a long forgotten real-world object.
I'm perfectly OK with it. Floppy has become the standard icon for "save" action. People have learnt it while using different applications and have got used to it.
Changing it would need more learning and cognitive efforts by users.
Reading this article and the comments made me realize that I never ever use the toolbar buttons and I only sometimes use the menu. For all of the main things (build/debug/run, cut/copy/paste, save, close window, etc.) I either use the Visual Studio or ReSharper keyboard shortcuts.
So I've turned the toolbars off and now have a few hundred more vertical pixels to work with. Nice.
I believe VS was always coupled to the Office look and feel...at least up until now.
Frankly, I'm impressed. The constantly shifting Office look and feel seems motivated by the desire to create artificial distinctions between versions of a product that peaked in 2000, or earlier.
Colours help to differentiate between icons. It's much easier to differentiate between and identify two differently coloured icons at a glance, than two monochrome icons.
To me it looks like they've put more effort into differentiating the shapes now that the icons aren't colored. Personally I think the increased contrast makes up for it -- the shapes in the monochrome icons are much more visible to me. I'd love to see their usability studies though. Perhaps you are right.
By removing all the borders/bars, and other useful grouping elements, they've made the application feel cluttered -- too many unrelated things share the same z-index. For example, the pinned panel titles, side panel buttons, inactive tabs, and toolbars are all on the same background. Considering how unrelated these things are in comparison to each other, I don't think they should share this same "zone".
I'm not saying a design like that can't be done, but the only way I can think of making it work would involve much better use of the grid system and much better spacing than what they have in these pictures. Considering how limited they are for space though, I think they were just better off with the 2010 look.
They mentioned they dumped the clipboard buttons because nobody uses them. I would guess the need with Visual Studio isn't so much "Save" but "Save All", which also updates various project files. (I don't know the Save All shortcut off the top of my head - I almost always use the toolbar button.)
VS seems to be going the way of Office, only the 80% of features that nobody uses are also often inferior to alternatives.
The bloat associated with VS is utterly unnecessary, I think it's an opportunity missed that VS hasn't been peeled right back to a glorified Notepad++ with the VS Gallery providing the mechanism to add / remove additional features from MS and from third parties.
I think it is hilarious that the 3.5" floppy disk is still an icon. What does a pair of them would mean? Copy disk? Commands you use every time you use a program don't really need an icon. Is there any overlap between the set of people who recognize the disk icon and the set of people who click in a toolbar to save a file?
It looks like they are implementing the functionality from a lot of the plugins available for VS2010 and making them standard functionality.
My biggest issue with VS2010 is the amount of memory it consumes. I hope they do something about that or some how let me disable functionality that I don’t need so I can reduce the footprint.
Some of the icons in the screenshots do in my mind look to be an improvement whilst others are so totally different that I am sure will frustrate the hell out of me until I have adjusted.
I know those screenshots are to show off as many widgets as possible but is it useful to show the tool with about 10% screen real estate dedicated to actual code.
>My biggest issue with VS2010 is the amount of memory it consumes
RAM is so cheap now that there is really no excuse for developers to skimp on it. I would rather hope that they work on improving the product in other areas than optimize it for 1GB. If there are leaks however, they need to be addressed.
VS2010 is still a 32-bit app. This puts a limit on just how much RAM it can use. I for one might be a little less alarmed by (though probably no more happy about) its carefree attitude if it were a 64-bit app.
I have not heard of a single VS instance taking over 4GB of RAM. The only time you'll get into trouble is with multiple VS instances - and there 40 bucks for another 4GB of RAM pay off instantly.
While VS itself doesn't consume large amount of memory, Resharper is a voracious memory eater. I used to regularly encountered OOM exceptions - not due to insufficient memory, rather because of excessive .net memory fragmentation brought about the holy marriage of VS2010 & R#. IIRC, this type of memory problem did not occur in VS2008 too frequently. Recent versions of R# have ameliorated the problem to a large extent however.
So the ribbon UI will not be used in the next generation of what is arguably MS's most technical and deadly-serious product. They're sticking with old-fashioned menus and non-paging toolbars.
I still use VS 2008 on WinXP. VS 2010 is much slower because it's based on WPF. I hate having to wait 0.1-2 seconds for text editor to respond. Also VS 2010 IDE feels non-native.
I would point out that line numbers are an option in VS. Secondly, I believe we are getting to a point where giant monolithic files should be the exception rather than the rule. Lastly, the ability to right click on a symbol and go directly to it's definition, see a clickable list of all its uses, and the fact that all warnings/errors are clickable means that the line numbers are less-important frankly. I still have mine on always but I rarely use them.
Actually both IE and Firefox now (I think) insert tabs to the left. I don't know why it became a 'thing' at some point, I dislike it enormously as well.
I like it that way. It allows me to think of the tabs like a stack. In any case, you can easily change the default, it's not like you use a new machine every week that needs to be configured again.
I must admit it looks much nicer. One of the things I observer when I moved back to Emacs a couple years ago was how the tools, buttons, borders, panels were distracting and one of their design goals was to make the code the more important visual element.
The blog is by UX designer guy. So obviously he's focusing on the UI changes. Hope there are more substantial changes in this release other than just a change in color scheme and iconography.
It's interesting that Microsoft chose to adopt monochrome icons after Mac OS X / iTunes adopted monochrome icons. I'd be curious if Apple's design was a major influence on Microsoft's designers, or if the idea for monochrome icons came primarily from independent research/user testing.
This looks more like an extension of the UI style they started adopting with the Expression tools back in 2008, which itself was more directly influenced by Adobe tools like Photoshop Elements and Lightroom than iTunes or Mac OS.
If you really want to tie Apple into it, then the anchor would be Aperture (which obviously influenced Adobe), not really iTunes or recent releases of Mac OS.
FWIW, I first noticed the "use monochrome icons to reduce distraction" approach in Windows 7, when it was applied to the default system tray icons. I think that predates the Apple trend (but I don't follow Apple closely enough to know).
I suspect these kinds of things tend to just be general "design" trends though - I bet the people designing these interfaces probably talk to each other, subscribe to the same magazines, read the same articles, follow the same non-software industrial designers and artists etc.
I've been using Metro on a Samsung Series 7 Slate as my main PC/laptop/tablet for a couple of months now and don't quite see OLPC in there. But then, I've not used XO. FWIW I love Metro. The little UI touches like changing the volume or brightness make Windows 7 feel somehow... inadequate.
As for VS - yup, 2010 was slow. I actually went back to 2008 because even the Express editions were too slow on my little Vaio P-Series.
When you swipe in from the right side of the screen (in both Metro and from the desktop) you get the search, share, start, devices and settings icons. Touch settings, and you get WiFi, volume, brightness, notifications, power and language icons, from which you can make changes without closing the current window/app or having to open a new one.
Doing all of that in Windows 7 meant going to a whole herd of different places to do that sort of stuff.
Metro is just so much easier than moving down to the system tray with a mouse, or having to right-click the desktop, or having to go to the start menu.
> Touch settings, and you get WiFi, volume, brightness, notifications, power and language icons, from which you can make changes without closing the current window/app or having to open a new one.
So the settings charm is like android notification tray on steroids? That's pretty cool! I'd like to see this added to windowsphone too! :)
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