Microsoft Visual Studio 2012 Reviewed | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft Visual Studio 2012 Reviewed

drdobbs.com

43 pointsAndreyKarpov29 comments

Scott Hanselman has a post on how to make the appearance closer to VS2010. Including a registry setting to change the menus to title case.

http://www.hanselman.com/blog/YourColorfulVisualStudio2012Wi...

It's not like VS2010 ever integrated nicely with the look of other applications. I mean, blue...

That said, since they are diverging from any kind of standard look, making the colors customizable is certainly a good thing.

This quote rings very true to me: "Speaking off the record, a Microsoft employee with the Windows 8 team confessed that the Metro team was "very surprised" when they saw how the Visual Studio team had interpreted the Metro guidelines. We share in his puzzlement."

Visual Studio stands out even from other Windows 8 system applications in its usage of the "Metro" style.

Idiots. It's not "Metro" that VS 2012 is trying to copy with this look; it's Office 2013. See http://zapp5.staticworld.net/images/article/2012/07/3_word_r... for an example.

VS is still ugly, of course, but it's because the designers copied the ugly Office design -- not because they didn't understand Metro.

Disclaimer: I work at Microsoft, but no longer on the VS team. Also, I have a cold and am in a bad mood.

I can see exactly what you mean, but the point you make is marred by your usage of the word "Idiots." The concept of Office being a different kind of "Metro" than normal Metro is not obvious to everyone.

Edit: I guess I'm just confused about who "Idiots" refers to. The quoted MS employee? The people agreeing with the quote? Everyone in the comment thread?

Also, to be clear: I work at MS and on a couple small parts of VS. I wasn't really part of any of the UI decisions.

Give the poster a break, idiots could refer to whoever at Microsoft said that (as they were correctly not well informed nor had any special information).

Office and Visual Studio are of the new "metro-inspired" UIs that, for very good reasons, cannot migrate away from desktop right now. I'm sure we'll eventually see some of these apps move to more Metro UIs (Office?), but for some they will always be desktop (Visual Studio).

Disclaimer: work for Microsoft, but nowhere near these teams.

"Idiots" is mostly because I'm in a bad mood. But also, yeah, referring both to the person being quoted and to the person doing the quoting.

Good to know that I'm an idiot for thinking that VS2012 is trying to follow guidelines by a product in RTM instead of a product that is in beta and I have no interaction with. Of course I'm also just in a bad mood because I have to use the Pending Changes window in VS 2012 on a daily basis.

It runs on the "Desktop" side of Windows 8, rather than in the "Metro environment" (for lack of or perhaps my own ignorance of a better term), right? If so, should it even really be trying to use the Metro style? I'm not familiar with Microsoft's guidelines on this, but I'd imagined that "desktop apps" would continue to use something similar to the traditional Windows design language.

Edit: CurtHagenlocher's comment cleared some of the confusion up for me. It's not Metro, it's ... "Windows 8 style". Wait no, that term means Metro too. It's "Office 2013" style.

I would expect their own apps to rely on whatever user interface libraries the OS offers in order to remain consistent and seamlessly integrate with the other applications on the machine. I have used Windows (and developed lots of software on it) and it always struck me as odd that some MS applications had bits and pieces of the next release of Windows cooked into its interface. I am used to various UI flavors at the same time and rarely even notice it, but I spend most of my time on Linux and I would never expect Emacs to nicely blend in with the rest of the Unity desktop.

Is it too hard to make an IDE only with the UI elements Windows offers? How much extra effort does it represent to make an application that's different from the vanilla look and feel of the environment?

How many ribbons Microsoft has? http://85mph.posterous.com/ui-consistency-anyone

You should have heard what we said when we saw the Server 2012, Visual Studio 2012, and Windows 8 GUIs.

"Damn! WTF are they smoking in Redmond!?"

Thankfully I can run all the above in virtual machines. :)

I think they ignored the metro guidelines. Thank fuck.

I'm still disappointed that deploying to Windows XP isn't supported at launch.

I'll be waiting until the patch this fall[1] before even considering upgrading.

[1]http://blogs.msdn.com/b/vcblog/archive/2012/06/15/10320645.a...

Imagine how I must feel: They didn't support Windows ME, either!

Take for example Steam's hardware survey at http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey?platform=pc

Windows XP 32-bit still has over 13% of market share in a relatively 'advanced' segment of the market. Hardly deserving the sarcasm.

Don't be cruel. I'm reading this on a machine running XP alongside my 100,000 co-workers running with the same. The company-wide upgrade to Win7 has been running late for the last few years...

I hope this company don't end up have to pay for Custom Support for XP!

No Windows 3.1 support, no deal.

Whose brilliant idea was it to MAKE THE MENUS SHOUT AT YOU? Glad to see there's a registry key to fix that... but still, when did Microsoft start listening to my great aunt Gertrude about proper capitalization?

Also, I agree, the reviews aren't hitting the most important points about the new VS. Does it fix all those annoying bugs we've all been struggling with for 10 years? My guess is no (since as I said, most of them have been there for over a decade). Instead of putting time mucking with the look and feel on a tool that is SOLELY used by developers... how about fixing the bugs that cause us to lose hours of time every week? You know, like where VS crashes, or decides it can't load dependencies in installer files, or the horribly slow search, or the occasional complete hang of the UI for 20 seconds, or the fact that a minor change to an installer project completely changes the whole incomprehensible project file? How about those bugs?

But I guess most of this product was just supporting the new metro crap. Shouldn't OS compatibility be the Windows SDK team's problem, and let the Visual Studio guys... like, you know, work on Visual Studio?

hey NateDad 2 things when VS is choking on some simply whatever launch tasks manager , look at disk performance youll see its writing files in user\appdata\roaming somthing like that erase all MS files in that dir. also create your own build automation and dont count on anything but compling from VS .MSFT is returning to its roots as a tech marketing but vs2010 should work OK for another 2-3 years, by then you can migrate to somthing better.good luck!!

What I don't like of this version, is having to install VS with support for languages that I don't use. I use a 128GB SSD and I hate having those extra GBs wasting space.

And then, those new glyphs in the Solution Explorer, that are making my work a little bit slower. Maybe, that only means that I still need to get used to the new UI. =(

I am still extremely annoyed that the Visual Studio team hasn't adopted something like tmbundles for syntax highlighting. The Fonts and Colors dialog is basically unusable, and the best way to do any sort of bulk change is to export the settings and tweak the very limited set of properties.

This should have been titled as Microsoft Visual Studio 2012 "UI" Reviewed. The post is mostly about VS 2012 as IDE and lacks review of any other new features.

As a developer, the UI only matters to me for first few days or so and then it all just fades away in the background as the focus shifts to the code and the integrated tools. Sad that most of the reviews of VS 2012 that I have seen focus on its UI and color scheme rather than functionality. I doubt the color scheme matters to developers as much. May be to a fashion designer but not developers ...

Personally, I've found that I no longer think twice about the VS2012 UI (been using it since the beta). I don't know if I'm more or less productive than I was in VS2010, but the difference is likely marginal since I haven't noticed.

It's the kind of thing that, after a week or two, our brains will incorporate and ignore, even if we consciously hate it at first.

Indeed. I was one of the detractors at first, but the splashes of color they gave to the icons appeased my original complaints. After working in it for several weeks, I'd say it's just as easy (if not more so) to get around in code. I find the concept of "distractionless programming" to hold true; now when I go back to 2010 it feels overwhelming. My eyes are always leaving the code, where they should be.

In general, we don't need icons or buttons or menus to write code, so props to MS for sticking to their guns on this. Sometimes it's better to have a benevolent dictator than a democracy.

If you've been using Visual Studio for years prior to 2012 then this new UI is actually a pretty big deal. It's VERY different. I can get over the theme itself, but they also moved some buttons around which really messes with your motor memory for some things you've been doing for years. I'm looking at you "Transform All Templates" button!

Its not really not that different. Its not the simplification that Cloud9 has done, and its nothing wild like LightTable is attempting. Actually, 2012 is very conservative, they polished the UI, but its still basically the same IDE as it was in 2005.

I'm very excited to see new kinds of IDEs coming to market, Cloud9...and even LightTable. I think we are almost at the end of the line for SmallTalk-ish IDEs like Visual Studio or Eclipse.

IMO, the solution to "it's different" is either to learn how to use the newest version, or to not upgrade.

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