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Visual Studio '11' Announced

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Re: Visual Studio '11' Announced

#61

Post by davidjade »

[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]

I work everyday writing code for iOS apps using VS. I write code and compile, run unit tests, etc... in VS. I then use the same project and source files, load them into MonoDevelop and compile using MonoTouch on my Mac to generate native apps.

Re: Visual Studio '11' Announced

#62

Post by tlianza »

manuscreationis wrote: post #43

These are some nice concepts, but this is entirely overbaked (in my opinion). I don't find the colors of VS2k10 "distracting" me or making it "difficult" to find things at all. I am glad, however, they're removing a bunch of those useless buttons by default (of course you can always remove them yourself, but I digress). I can appreciate what they're attempting here, but why go this far without a road back? If you're…

100% agree. If this is what they spent time on, as opposed to the fact that, say, 'find' is dog-slow and doesn't reliably cancel, or that copy/paste randomly stops working, or that it has a tendency to hang several times a day... well, I just don't understand the priorities.

Re: Visual Studio '11' Announced

#63

Post by darrenkopp »

michael_miller wrote: post #14

It's interesting that Microsoft chose to adopt monochrome icons after Mac OS X / iTunes adopted monochrome icons. I'd be curious if Apple's design was a major influence on Microsoft's designers, or if the idea for monochrome icons came primarily from independent research/user testing.

All of this came from Expression Blend and Metro

Re: Visual Studio '11' Announced

#64

Post by oleganza »

algoshift wrote: post #53
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…

It isn't clear if you meant to imply that Apple has made better decisions with Xcode. If that is what you are saying, I firmly disagree. This isn't meant to imply that MS is better. Having said that, I don't mind complexity in UI for professional tools. I've been programming for longer than a lot of people on this list have been alive (an assumption on my part). You learn the tool you have to use and move on. No big…

I have clarified my point in another comment already. It's not about who's better. It's about who's trying to experiment and rethink things. In developer tools team of the top-10 tech company you have a great combo: best hard-core engineers on the planet + little need to maintain cruft and worry about competition. Why not experiment and try to be better at what you do? Xcode 4 is this radical attempt to improve old problems (of course introducing new ones). And VS does not try to eliminate old obvious problems and almost stays where it is in terms of UI.

Update: here are related thoughts on the subject: http://blog.oleganza.com/post/18156593863/why-apple-products...

Re: Visual Studio '11' Announced

#65

Post by jamesaguilar »

andypants wrote: post #60
jamesaguilar wrote: post #7

I like the new decolorized look. The colors don't seem to add much and are a bit noisy.

Colours help to differentiate between icons. It's much easier to differentiate between and identify two differently coloured icons at a glance, than two monochrome icons.

To me it looks like they've put more effort into differentiating the shapes now that the icons aren't colored. Personally I think the increased contrast makes up for it -- the shapes in the monochrome icons are much more visible to me. I'd love to see their usability studies though. Perhaps you are right.

Re: Visual Studio '11' Announced

#66

Post by repsilat »

cygx wrote: post #38
xpaulbettsx wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Cy…

One thing I'm pretty jealous of is "Designated initialization" in C99:

    int whitespace[256]
        = { [' '] = 1, ['\t'] = 1, ['\h'] = 1,
            ['\f'] = 1, ['\n'] = 1, ['\r'] = 1 };
Very cool.

Re: Visual Studio '11' Announced

#67

Post by algoshift »

oleganza wrote: post #64
algoshift wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It isn't clear if you meant to imply that Apple has made better decisions with Xcode. If that is what you are saying, I firmly disagree. This isn't meant to imply that MS is better. Having said that, I don't mind complexity in UI for professional tools. I've been programming for longer than a lot of people on this list have been alive (an assumption on my part). You learn the tool you have to use and move on. No big…

I have clarified my point in another comment already. It's not about who's better. It's about who's trying to experiment and rethink things. In developer tools team of the top-10 tech company you have a great combo: best hard-core engineers on the planet + little need to maintain cruft and worry about competition. Why not experiment and try to be better at what you do? Xcode 4 is this radical attempt to improve old p…

> Why not experiment and try to be better at what you do?

Herein lies the problem. The term "better" is most definitely subjective.

Not to pic on Xcode, but this is a prime example of focusing too much on making a consumer appliance rather than a professional tool. Like I said: I don't want iTunes, I want a kick-ass IDE.

I'm in the middle of a project that has, quite literally, thousands of assets to manage (images, audio, video). The thousands of files end-up piled-up without any semblance of organization in the project directory. I mean, who woke up one day and though "This is a good idea!" when you have a perfectly good file system to take advantage of? Updating assets is an absolute nightmare.

Yes, yes, there are crafty work-arounds. Each with its own pros-and-cons. The point is that the IDE itself was designed to totally ignore the underlying file system. Let's put it this way: If I wrote code like that at the many jobs I've had over the years I would have gotten fired in a microsecond. Yet, for some reason, this is "feature" is now considered good design?

Back to coding.

Re: Visual Studio '11' Announced

#68

Post by recoiledsnake »

dav-id wrote: post #31

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 oth…

>My biggest issue with VS2010 is the amount of memory it consumes

RAM is so cheap now that there is really no excuse for developers to skimp on it. I would rather hope that they work on improving the product in other areas than optimize it for 1GB. If there are leaks however, they need to be addressed.

Re: Visual Studio '11' Announced

#69

Post by AshleysBrain »

ajross wrote: post #32
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 f…

Probably to help beginners get going. You can hide all toolbars/status bars etc. if you wish.

Re: Visual Studio '11' Announced

#70

Post by Spearchucker »

bitwize wrote: post #5

I came shockingly close to projectile vomiting when I read the header "The New Developer Experience". My experience of developing is quite similar regardless of the tools I use. And I've been developing for years on a variety of toolkits including VS. A slick mobile UI styled facelift on their signature overweight IDE isn't going to radically change the developer's experience. (Also, who else looked at Metro and ICS'…

I've been using Metro on a Samsung Series 7 Slate as my main PC/laptop/tablet for a couple of months now and don't quite see OLPC in there. But then, I've not used XO. FWIW I love Metro. The little UI touches like changing the volume or brightness make Windows 7 feel somehow... inadequate.

As for VS - yup, 2010 was slow. I actually went back to 2008 because even the Express editions were too slow on my little Vaio P-Series.

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