I have just installed the new Visual Studio 2011 Beta for testing (yes I am a bit slow here but some of us have work to do) so here are my initial thoughts after a week playing with it.
Install
I elected to install the Ultimate version, if you intend to do the same be warned you are going to need plenty of patience, it took a good 2 hours and 2 reboots before I was up and running.
Design
This is probably the biggest change and possibly the worst. Microsoft has decided that colour is a bad thing and distracts developers from what matters i.e. writing code. I can certainly see the logic in this – the point of an IDE is to make it quicker and easier to get things done, anything which gets in the way of that is just noise.
Unfortunately, as is customary for MS they have got it spectacularly wrong and what they have ended up with is a boring bland UI which feels like a step backwards (it reminds me more of VS 2005 rather than VS 2010). Having just recently been converted to the world of Apple it is not too hard to see where they have got the inspiration from but it has the distinct feel of being designed by developers rather than by designers.
The default theme which is installed, the “light” theme, is particularly bad so the first thing that you should do is change to the slightly better “dark” theme – anyone who has used Expression Blend will feel right at home with this.
Possibly the worst part of the new UI (which seems to be universally hated) is the new panel separators which shout at you in big capital letters!
VS 2010 Roundtrip
Upgrading to new versions of VS in the past was something of a pain if more than one person was working on the project. Opening an old project in the new version would work and allow you to upgrade the project (most of the time) but in the process would destroy backwards compatibility so unless everyone on the team had upgraded you simply couldn't use the new version.
This is now much easier – you can open a VS 2010 solution in VS11 without breaking the project for other developers. There are a few caveats to this mainly that the project must have been created with VS2010 SP1 and if you make any VS 11 specific changes to the project it will no longer open in 2010.
Speed
In terms of speed nothing much seems to have changed from 2010, in fact the whole thing has the feel of more of an incremental change rather than a major update unlike the difference from 2008 > 2010 where it was completely rewritten.
Preview
If you single click on a file it will open a read-only “preview” of the file as a new tab on the right – start editing and it will open it up for editing and move to the main tabs on the left. Personally I see no good reason for this and can be just confusing.
Multi Monitor Support
VS 2010 introduced better support for multiple monitors and this has been enhanced in 11 – I have not fully tested this but it seems to do the job fairly well.
This is as far as I have got at the moment. Putting the design to one side I actually think this is a very impressive update, lets just hope Microsoft have a bit of a change of heart by the time the full version is released and add some colour.
My next challenge is to build a Metro app....
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