Visual Studio 2012 and .NET Framework 4.5 released

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jasonz/archive/2012/08/15/visual-studio-2012-and-net-framework-4-5-released-to-the-web.aspx

by cygwin98 • 14 years ago

143 78 14 years ago

blogs.msdn.com

cygwin98• 14 years ago

It's great that the new async feature is made official now.

Off topic: Is that team in the picture behind VS and .NET? That seems extremely a small number of developers out there. I was expecting at least a few hundreds of people.

walkon2• 14 years ago

Possibly just the VS team without any .NET and language teams.

sriramk2• 14 years ago

The VS team is many orders of magnitude than what you see there. I suspect that those are just the release PMs.

abhimishra• 14 years ago

It's much much bigger - the blurb suggests that this is just the "release team", which I am guessing means they manage the release process.

runako2• 14 years ago

I am astonished that they shipped VS 2010 knowing that it took over 20 seconds after launch to start editing VB code.

Kudos for the improvement, though.

adrr• 14 years ago

VS 2010 was a big turd of an IDE. I wonder how this version compares to VS.net 2008.

beagle33• 14 years ago

I feel everything since VC++6 (released 1998, if I'm not mistaken) has been going downhill.

(I don't really like .net -- I'm referring primarily to the C++ IDE; and I also think the VB6 IDE is nicer than any VB.NET one)

skeletonjelly• 14 years ago

Lucky for them Microsoft just released a new version of the .NET framework that includes async!

Rickasaurus• 14 years ago

I'm so excited about F# type providers I can't even put it into words. Strongly typed access directly into datasets is going to save me so much frickin time.

aaronbrethorst• 14 years ago

THE MENUS ARE STILL SCREAMING AT US, I REALLY WISH THEY'D CHANGED THAT BACK, SINCE IT MAKES IT A LOT HARDER TO READ.

Edit: there are actually studies on this. See, for example, this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_caps#Readability

Edit 2: Also considering that, once upon a time, I was the Program Manager who would've owned implementation of this misfeature, I feel entitled to complain.

sergiotapia3• 14 years ago

Like you actually need to have readability for single word menu options. Stop nitpicking y tratando de buscarle cinco pies al gato.

jjcm• 14 years ago

I've been using it for the last 5 months or so. Honestly, it's 15 labels at the top, all of which I know the positioning of. They could be cryptic/obscure symbols from The 5th Element, and I'd still know what each one does based on their position. Yea, it takes a couple more seconds to parse the menus the first time you look at it, but after a while you memorize what they are anyway. If menu readability is the worst thing people can find about VS2012, then I'd say they did an OK job with it.

MichaelGG2• 14 years ago

I don't think most people are honestly saying "oh dear, how will I ever find the Debug menu".

They're objecting to an obviously annoying move with no clear rationale. The VS beta had an entirely different set of text in all caps. The fact that they had to hunt around capitalizing stuff in order to "Metro-ize" it just shows its mainly a political move. (Office 2013 has also gone the route of randomly capitalizing things; there is apparently no motivating rationale for which parts of the UI on a desktop app deserve caps.)

Users are rightly annoyed that Microsoft's making these silly changes, and because they're so visible, of course there will be a lot of vocal feedback.

A more cynical person might even think this was by design: Make one really prominent annoying feature, and drown out concerns on anything else.

smhinsey• 14 years ago

I haven't installed it yet, but I am pretty sure I read that this was something you could disable.

to3m• 14 years ago

I AGREE. IT REMINDS ME OF PROGRAMMING ON MY BBC MICRO, ONLY WITHOUT THE KEYBOARD MACRO SUPPORT.

wideroots• 14 years ago

You can do the registry hack to turn off "ALL CAPS MENU" http://www.richard-banks.org/2012/06/how-to-prevent-visual-s...

silverlake• 14 years ago

Thank you! I will name my first child "wideroots" in your honor. :)

redact2072• 14 years ago

I've been using 2012 for 3 months and honestly I'm starting to like the all caps. As the main menu bar it helps to disassociate it with the rest of the however many toolbars you have open. But really, it's one very small part of a massive IDE.

pbz2• 14 years ago

Why would you need any toolbars? If I could I would disable the top menu as well...

siodine• 14 years ago

Complainers gonna complain.

cooldeal• 14 years ago

Funny how it seems the only people in the comments here who seem to be complaining about the all caps menu(which can be turned off with a registry setting) are people who don't appear to be using VS on a regular basis, if at all.

usea2• 14 years ago

I think the all caps is pretty terrible and I use VS all day at work and on my personal time for hobby projects.

Obviously it's not the end of the world, but as far as design decisions go it is pretty silly.

CurtHagenlocher• 14 years ago

I'm far more annoyed by the new icons than I am by the CAPS MENUS. They may actually force me to finally learn their key bindings after all these years...

shawndumas• 14 years ago

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\11.0\General\SuppressUppercaseConversion REG_DWORD value: 1

shanselman• 14 years ago

EMBRACE THE CASE

;)

http://visualstudiowallpapers.com/post/25145983097/embrace-t...

noselasd• 14 years ago

As someone who don't have VS2012 - a screenshot of what you're talking about ?

freehunter2• 14 years ago

From the article:

https://blogs.msdn.com/cfs-filesystemfile.ashx/__key/communi...

stephengillie• 14 years ago

Stupid question: Why can't we create skins for VS the way we used to skin Winamp?

highace• 14 years ago

I especially like the VS2012 web inspector - it's like having Firebug or Chrome Inspector plugged into the live code, html, and css, so any changes you make are saved.

sergiotapia3• 14 years ago

This changes EVERYTHING.

rodly2• 14 years ago

Are you being sarcastic? Low quality comment nonetheless.

---

To parent of his comment, what do you mean exactly? Firebug already lets you change code and see the results immediately.

ConstantineXVI2• 14 years ago

I know IDEA (IntelliJ, RubyMine, etc.) has an browser-tied debugger as well; haven't made much use of either for web dev so can't give a fair opinion on how they compare.

sergiotapia3• 14 years ago

I've downloaded and used the RC and ran it on Windows 8 and I'm lovin' it. Great interface, the solutions explorer has a lot more built in options.

The CSS features are superb, and MVC support is great. I'm really looking forward to it.

elktea• 14 years ago

There's some nice WPF features in the 4.5 release, it's a shame it seems to have been replaced with WinRT as the UI language of choice in Windows 8.

ConstantineXVI2• 14 years ago

IIRC, the low-end ("Professional") MSVS 2010 outside of MSDN still came with some sort of basic access that got you the current Windows; does 2012 still have that? I don't see any mention of it on the store page.

rjzzleep2• 14 years ago

afair 2012 only allows for windows 8 apps. for the rest youd probably have to use an older runtime with vs 2011 express.

tedunangst2• 14 years ago

The currently available release of Express only supports Windows 8 (Metro) apps. The Pro version supports "desktop" apps, as does a supposedly forthcoming Express version.

eswangren2• 14 years ago

I just hope it's faster. VS has been getting noticeably slower with each release since 6. It's unbearable at times.

redact2072• 14 years ago

Really? When was the last time you upgraded? It's been getting noticeably faster since 2008.

modernshoggoth• 14 years ago

Agree and disagree. At my last job I had 6, 2008 & 2010 all installed (legacy apps, yay).

6 was amazingly responsive but sucked if you had to read/write anything (like, say, compiling). 2008 was average-slow at everything. 2010 had a go-away-&-make-a-coffee startup time that pounded the HDD, but after that was VERY fast given the complexity of the jobs it was given.

seanmcdirmid3• 14 years ago

I can't believe anyone could say this with a straight face when comparing VS2010 with VS2008. 2012 is much improved and almost feels as fast as 2008.

berkut• 14 years ago

Updating intellisense!!

echion• 14 years ago

There are some actual numbers here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudio/archive/2012/07/16/impr...

rbanffy• 14 years ago

Loved the

HEY, YOU GUYS FORGOT #0:

A FRIENDLY, SCREAM-CENTRIC UI, READY TO SHOUT AT EVERY DIRECTION HOW MUCH IT LOVES YOU.

THANKS, I FEEL LIKE USING COBOL AGAIN!

comment.

jiggy2011• 14 years ago

Wow, that's an ugly UI. And this is coming from somebody who uses Eclipse.

Visual Studio was nice because it always felt "cosy" and fitted very nicely into Windows. I'm not even sure what this looks like, is it supposed to be Metro? Reminds me more of Java Swing.

The lack of any embossing or clear separation on icons/menus looks like it's going to difficult to mouse with.

modarts• 14 years ago

WHAT'S UP WITH THE ALL CAPS MENU?

barefoot• 14 years ago

I've been using (publicly available) pre-release versions of Visual Studio 2012 since late last year.

The all-capital elements certainly appear to be a stylistic design decision but it's used so sparingly (and less so now) that it's difficult to complain about. If it's not for style then it's a brilliant channeling of focalism in a release with hundreds if not thousands of changes:

"What's wrong?"

"The menu casing - the main menu is all in capital letters!"

"That's all?"

[Pause]

"You mentioned a discount if I buy today, right?"

Not to sound like a shill, but the IDE includes a number of practical improvements over 2010 that are much appreciated. Projects now load in the background, search has been embraced and works extremely well, and for all of the complaints about the UI it's a lot less visually noisy and just feels better to work with over longer coding sessions.

weazl• 14 years ago

That is not all, there is also a distinct lack of contrast in both brightness and color all over, also all icons look pretty much the same so they're essentially useless.

In an effort to "focus on the content" everything else have taken a back seat, to hell with useability and a visually pleasing experience.

guilloche• 14 years ago

I remember that I saw the news that MS would not continue to develope .Net and would focus on C++ again and shift to html5.

freehunter2• 14 years ago

I don't remember Microsoft saying that. What I do remember is a bunch of blogs getting a bit antsy because Microsoft wouldn't tell them how .NET was going to evolve for Windows 8. They blew this up into "Microsoft is abandoning .NET and orphaning 600,000 developers!"

Visual Studio 2012 and .NET Framework 4.5 released

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