I’ve been using Visual Studio 2010 for a few days now and I must say, I’m impressed. The version I’ve been using is the Team Suite version, Beta 1. I really like the multi monitor support as well as the possibility to zoom in on text and the fact that Visual Studio is now built using WPF makes Visual Studio 2010 a complete new experience. It is notably slower than the 2008 version though, it doesn’t feel as snappy as what 2008 did. With 2010 you get a new .Net Framework, but I’m not going into new features of .Net 4.0 in this post. In stead I’ll concentrate on the IDE. Some random thoughts:

• The code editor has improved a lot, as has Intellisense. Documents can be dragged out of the main window and be put anywhere, even full-screen on a different monitor. You can zoom in- and out of text, park the cursor onto a variable/member and see where it is referenced, refactoring is improved and you can toggle Intellisense between standard mode and consume-first mode.
• ClickOnce has changed a bit, and a some UI options have been taken away, especially in the partial trust area. There are still ways around this though, but it means a bit more hand-work. For the rest, not much noticeable in this part, if I forgot something, please let me know.
• The icons used in the UI are still the same as the last version, I guess they had their hands full rewriting the IDE. (And there are a LOT of icons in Visual Studio!) This doesn’t bother me though, functionality I think is way more important.
• No project templates for Office 2003… Options have been taken out as well… I guess that was to be expected since Office 2003 is out of mainstream support, but I’m a bit sad about it since some of my projects still use Office 2003 integration.  Maybe there’s a way around this, I have no clue.
• F# Made it into Visual Studio. IronPyton and IronRuby haven’t? Probably an add-on
• New UML Modelling project, no idea how to use it though :)

Except all of this, extensibility and the new Team Foundation Server is there. Team build uses Workflow Foundation, and gated check-ins, so on that part we’ll probably see more improvement as well.

All in all, a fine release.

Wednesday, June 10, 2009 5:40:03 PM (Pacific SA Standard Time, UTC-04:00)      Comments [0]