Visual Studio 2012 and .NET Framework 4.5 released | Hacker News Reader

Visual Studio 2012 and .NET Framework 4.5 released

blogs.msdn.com

143 pointscygwin9878 comments

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.

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\11.0\General\SuppressUppercaseConversion REG_DWORD value: 1

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.

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.

You can do the registry hack to turn off "ALL CAPS MENU" http://www.richard-banks.org/2012/06/how-to-prevent-visual-s...

Thank you! I will name my first child "wideroots" in your honor. :)

I AGREE. IT REMINDS ME OF PROGRAMMING ON MY BBC MICRO, ONLY WITHOUT THE KEYBOARD MACRO SUPPORT.

I've been using 2012 for 3 months and honestly I'm starting to like the all caps. As the main menu bar it helps to disassociate it with the rest of the however many toolbars you have open. But really, it's one very small part of a massive IDE.

Why would you need any toolbars? If I could I would disable the top menu as well...

This is exactly how I run VS 2012. The VSCommands addon[1][2], allows auto-hide of the main menu, fixing case, and some other nifty UI fixes. I expect the author will do quite well just by fixing the stuff people are pissed off about.

1: http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/a83505c6-77b3-...

2: http://vscommands.squaredinfinity.com/

Best extension ever! I've been keeping my eye on it for last year or so and I like where it's going!

You mean with something like this: http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/bdbcffca-32a6-...

I don't believe it has been released for 2012 yet, but I am pretty sure it will be (I can ask Matt tomorrow at work, but I can't see why he wouldn't as I don't believe it would require any changes, just updating the manifest to say it supports 2012).

I didn't know about it, thanks.

I haven't installed it yet, but I am pretty sure I read that this was something you could disable.

EMBRACE THE CASE

;)

http://visualstudiowallpapers.com/post/25145983097/embrace-t...

I'm far more annoyed by the new icons than I am by the CAPS MENUS. They may actually force me to finally learn their key bindings after all these years...

Stupid question: Why can't we create skins for VS the way we used to skin Winamp?

As someone who don't have VS2012 - a screenshot of what you're talking about ?

From the article:

https://blogs.msdn.com/cfs-filesystemfile.ashx/__key/communi...

Like you actually need to have readability for single word menu options. Stop nitpicking y tratando de buscarle cinco pies al gato.

Funny how it seems the only people in the comments here who seem to be complaining about the all caps menu(which can be turned off with a registry setting) are people who don't appear to be using VS on a regular basis, if at all.

I think the all caps is pretty terrible and I use VS all day at work and on my personal time for hobby projects.

Obviously it's not the end of the world, but as far as design decisions go it is pretty silly.

Complainers gonna complain.

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.

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.

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.

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

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)

"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.

No mouse wheel support? First 3 Google results solve the problem for you. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1039673/how-can-i-make-mo...

I've spent a significant amount of time in VB6 back in the day and built many large and complicated apps several of which are still in use today (including a mission critical 911 center app). The IDE was pretty awesome with features that are unmatched to this day (COM library indirection for instance). Debugging was super quick, Edit and Continue worked great.

I still have to use it regularly (with service pack 6), and it isn't that bad. Of course any modern IDE is far superior, but it hasn't crashed on me, there's a mouse scroll add-in, and it doesn't get in the way.

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.

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

  ...has been going downhill.
  ...I'm referring primarily to the C++ IDE

How, specifically?

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?

11 seconds to start editing code, for starters. I don't remember VS6 being anywhere near that slow.

That's too flimsy a reason for labelling a product as "going downhill", in my opinion - but to each his/her own. You do realize that VS2010 has way more functionality than VS6 - debugging parallel apps/attaching to native, non-native processes and being able to step through both varieties of calls/code completion and snippets etc?

I'm not sure if you are being serious or not. You talk about all those great features that the user isn't probably interested in using, then blame those features for why the user can't start editing code in a few seconds?

Features are great when you need them. But when you don't need them, they shouldn't be negatives. Incidentally, I don't think it was really features that made VS2010 slow.

I am being serious. I'd rather doubt the seriousness of anyone moaning about an 11-second delay before they can start to code using Visual Studio while ignoring the features one truly uses Visual Studio for (which you have conveniently labelled as "not interested in using").

Why are they using Visual Studio at all then? Why not Textpad/Notepad++ or Emacs if they're so concerned about startup time? The only IDE that does come close to VS in functionality is Eclipse and that has a woefully slow startup time - never stopped any Java developer from touting that as the greatest IDE ever (it exceeds VS in many cases, IMO). Both of these IDEs, once they load, are extremely responsive considering the scale of the projects they are made to handle. JIT compilation occurs for chunks of code as you type code - that is dazzlingly fast for VS (and it's not just plain symbol-based lookup as used to happen in VS6 IntelliSense).

  Incidentally, I don't think it was really features that made VS2010 slow

What do you think makes it slow during startup? According to me, it's sub-component/assembly/library load time during IDE startup and file parsing/symbol loading time during/after project-load.

Its not just start up time (only relevant on reboot or VS crash), its the amount of time it takes for VS2010 to page back in after being idle for a few hours, its the amount of it takes to edit a file, the amount of time it takes for code completion to activate, the amount of time to build your project. I'm only comparing 2010 to 2008, Microsoft's biggest competitors are often its own older products!

We can speculate all we want on what the deal is with VS2010; I'm just happy 2012 seems faster.

That's a valid comparison - 2008 vs 2010 (versus the stupid VS6 comparison) - and one I agree with in many respects - especially UI responsiveness.

However, paging-in after idle-time is pretty similar, in my experience for both 2008 and 2010 (2008 fares worse for large solutions - especially if they have web projects in there). Build times are actually faster for VS 2010 (especially if you're on x64 - where it can use multiple cores). Symbol-loading when attaching to a process to debug is way faster for VS 2010 than in 2008. Detaching from a process also seems to have less negative consequences - VS 2008 just crashed in many cases.

However, VS 2010 is way too chatty in debug trace outputs. Also, slightly slower in parsing includes for IntelliSense after project load (not so during build though, funnily enough).

And will it run under Linux (wine) - http://www.go-oo.org/~fridrich/msvc6-linux.png

Lucky for them Microsoft just released a new version of the .NET framework that includes async!

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.

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.

It's much much bigger - the blurb suggests that this is just the "release team", which I am guessing means they manage the release process.

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

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

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.

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.

>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 :))

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.

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.

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.

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.

This changes EVERYTHING.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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?

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.

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.

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!"

WHAT'S UP WITH THE ALL CAPS MENU?

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

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

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.

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.

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.

There are some actual numbers here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudio/archive/2012/07/16/impr...

Updating intellisense!!

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!

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