Visual Studio '11' Announced • Hacker News Board

Re: Visual Studio '11' Announced

#31

Post by dav-id » Thu, Feb 23, 2012, 9:47 PM UTC

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.

Re: Visual Studio '11' Announced

#32

Post by ajross » Thu, Feb 23, 2012, 9:48 PM UTC

brosephius wrote: post #3

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?

Re: Visual Studio '11' Announced

#33

Post by WayneDB » Thu, Feb 23, 2012, 9:48 PM UTC

[deleted] wrote: post #24

blackhole wrote: post #18

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…

[deleted]

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.

Re: Visual Studio '11' Announced

#34

Post by WayneDB » Thu, Feb 23, 2012, 9:51 PM UTC

Too wrote: post #25

WayneDB wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you know all the relevant keyboard shorcuts you can just hide the toolbars :)

I like the toolbars though. I guess what I like and what I want didn't test well though...with that enormous sample size.

Re: Visual Studio '11' Announced

#35

Post by MartinCron » Thu, Feb 23, 2012, 9:53 PM UTC

bwarp wrote: post #12

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.

Re: Visual Studio '11' Announced

#36

Post by oleganza » Thu, Feb 23, 2012, 9:54 PM UTC

oleganza wrote: post #20

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…

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?

Re: Visual Studio '11' Announced

#37

Post by dkersten » Thu, Feb 23, 2012, 9:55 PM UTC

blackhole wrote: post #18

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…

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.

Re: Visual Studio '11' Announced

#38

Post by cygx » Thu, Feb 23, 2012, 9:56 PM UTC

xpaulbettsx wrote: post #28

CedarMadness wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All that C++ support and they still don't support C99...

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...

Re: Visual Studio '11' Announced

#39

Post by eatporktoo » Thu, Feb 23, 2012, 9:59 PM UTC

bwarp wrote: post #12

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.

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.

Re: Visual Studio '11' Announced

#40

Post by bentlegen » Thu, Feb 23, 2012, 10:00 PM UTC

WayneDB wrote: post #23

ax wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quote from the article: 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 a…

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.

Neither does your singular data point.