On September 12, 2012, Visual Studio 2012 was released to the public and Microsoft of course had a very nice release event. As I couldn’t attend in person (it’s a 14 hour flight from where I live to Seattle) I as many others watched the live-stream from VisualStudioLaunch.com.
During the last 6 months I’ve had the pleasure to work with what is today known as Visual Studio 2012. This is (all colors aside) by far the best IDE that I’ve ever worked with. I’m of course biased since I’ve worked with Visual Studio since as far back as I can remember, but it’s truly been a great improvement since then.
Microsoft did not only announce all improvements and new features, they also announced that they will release updates to Visual Studio 2012 more often than what we have been used to before. The first update will be released before the end of the year and we will see a CTP version of this before the end of the month.
To get more familiar with all the new features that comes with Visual Studio 2012, .NET 4.5 and so forth, Microsoft has put a lot of effort into creating screencasts on each subject. These screencasts can be found at the Visual Studio 2012 Launch site.
Visual Studio 2012 Express versions
If you haven’t already downloaded and installed Visual Studio 2012, you should be sure to do so.
You can find the free Express versions here:
Another very nice add-on that Microsoft announced together with Visual Studio 2012 Express for Web is that you can now use F# in your ASP.NET applications. You can get the “F# Tools for Visual Studio Express 2012 for Web” through the web platform installer. Be sure to check out the F# Team Blog‘s announcement on this.
Let’s build great apps with Visual Studio 2012, happy coding!
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You can now download and install a new version of the Roslyn CTP. The Roslyn CTP is now compatible with Visual Studio 2012 RC for this you will need to download and install Microsoft Visual Studio 2012 RC SDK!
Installing Visual Studio 2012 RC SDK
Installing Roslyn CTP v2
Testing Roslyn in Visual Studio 2012 RC
When the installation has finished, you can start Visual Studio 2012 and create a Roslyn Console Application:
Then we can create a simple ScriptEngine that just executes a snippet:
var engine
= new ScriptEngine
();
var result
= engine
.Execute<bool>("var x = 10; x == 0");
Console
.WriteLine(result
);
I tried upgrading the code from the my previous post on “Hosted code execution” and it seems to only be minor changes that are needed. These were the only errors:
- The constructor for
CompilationOptions takes less parameters ( no longer a lot of optional parameters )
ParseOptions no longer has a constructor defined, use CompilationOptions.DefaultObjectFormatter no longer has a constructor defined, use ObjectFormatter.Instance
There are most likely a lot of other changes made, but these are the ones that broke the build of “Hosted code execution“.
See a list of API Changes here. The post also lists the new language features implemented since CTP1 (C#):
- Anonymous Types
- Attributes (full support)
- Base call support
- Checked and unchecked expressions and blocks
- Events
- Finalizers
- Generic constraints
- Implicitly-typed arrays
- Indexers
- Iterators
- Lock statements
- Named and optional parameters
- Param array parameters
- Partial methods
- Operator overloading
- Query expressions
- Switch statements
- User-defined conversions
- Using statements
- Volative fields
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Yesterday on February 29, Visual Studio 11 Beta was released and with it comes a beta version of .NET 4.5. You can download Visual Studio 11 Ultimate Beta from Microsofts website.
There has been some changes to the UI that has gotten a lot of attention the last couple of weeks, let’s take a closer look at what we can expect from the Visual Studio 11 Beta.
The first thing that we are faced with is the installer, all the installers for Visual Studio has in my opinion looked much better than any other installers and the installer for Visual Studio 11 Beta is the winner among them. It got a very nice look and feel over it and it’s clear they’ve put some effort into the smallest details.
If you are installing Visual Studio 11 Beta with the Web Installer, it will take some time. Once the installation has finished fire up Visual Studio!
When the first screenshots of the Beta was released, many of the Visual Studio users were surprised of the monochrome interface. It’s a quite drastic change compared to what we are used to in Visual Studio. Up until Visual Studio 2010 we’ve been comfortable with a lot of colors and nice icons.
Now, the workspace is in more focus.
The menus, icons, tabs and everything else in the interface just feels right. When you spend 8+ hours per day in Visual Studio, you want something that is easy on the eyes and that is exactly what this is.
Even the icons in the menu have a monochrome approach.
Let us take a look at how it looks and feels to write code, create a new console application.
When the project is created and you’ve got the Program.cs opened add some content to it to get a feeling of the studio.
As you can see the code is in focus, nothing else is stealing your attention. The code coloring is what we are used to and the key mapping as well. Notice the Solution Explorer, there’s an expand button for each file that will let you view classes, methods and properties in the file.
You attention is automatically going towards what is important, the code. Let’s take a look at a last screenshot where it is more clear that the code, comments and breakpoints get your attention.
After you have tried Visual Studio 11, leave a comment and let me know what you think of it!
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For those that don’t want to install the Windows 8 Developer Preview on their workstation just to try out and develop applications in Visual Studio 11, I can happily say that Visual Studio 11 runs perfectly fine side by side Visual Studio 2010 on Windows 7!
You can download the Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview on MSDN by clicking here!
Happy coding!
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Filip Ekberg is a Senior Software Engineer working in the country with all the polar bears, author of a self-published C# programming book and overall in love with programming.
