Tag: Visual Studio 11

Visual Studio 11 Release Candidate Updated After User Feedback

We reported back in February that Microsoft launched the Visual Studio 11 beta for developers to try ou and give their thoughts before the actual product launch. Microsoft says that there has been “significant” community response to the beta and so they are introducing some changes to the user interface to satisfy the needs of the community.

The community feedback for the Visual Studio 11 beta has been corralled into three key areas:

An overall desire for more visual “energy” and contrast
Calls for a more balanced application of Metro styling
A desire for greater icon clarity and differentiation through the use of color

To that effect, Microsoft has made some significant changes to Visual Studio 11 for the release candidate version. The company has provided before and after comparisons to show the changes that were made.

Visual Studio 11 Beta

Visual Studio 11 RC

The first problem was there was not enough color. Many users complained that everything was too gray. To that end, they have taken steps to colorize more of the components that developers will work with. Apparently colorize means turning everything blue, but blue and gray are a nice combination. The other change is bringing more colors to the status bar to denote different statuses from development to debug mode.

Since Visual Studio 11 is likely to launch alongside Windows 8, Microsoft has been applying the Metro style to the interface in the form of using all caps for the tool window titles. These have been returned to normal with only the top level menu items going all caps for greater emphasis.

To better fit into the Metro style, Microsoft has also created a new window chrome. No longer will there be a blue border around the window to denote the OS namesake. Now the entire window is the same color to bring the entire thing together. I find it more aesthetically pleasing, but some are sure to disagree.

Probably the biggest change introduced in the Visual Studio 11 beta was the removal of color from icons. This obviously created some confusion for similar looking commands since color is a great way to tell these apart. Microsoft has heard the complaints and will be adding color back to select commands.

Color is also being added back into the icons within the Solution Explorer, IntelliSense and the application icons. This should make everything more readable and easier to distinguish.

It’s obvious that Microsoft cares about their users by making these important changes to Visual Studio 11. There’s still more work to be done though before the official launch sometime this year. If you have yet to download it, check out the Visual Studio 11 beta and keep sending your feedback.

May 9, 2012
Visual Studio 11 Beta Improves Find & Replace

Microsoft has been busy lately improving and fixing the Visual Studio 11 beta. The changes thus far have all been much needed updates that make the program easier to use for professionals and amateurs alike. From a more visual based UI to improving update delivery, Microsoft seems committed to making Visual Studio 11 the best it can be when it officially launches. The software is still in beta though and Microsoft is taking user feedback to heart with its latest fix.

The Visual Studio team announced in a blog post today that they are making some changes to the Find and Replace options within VS11. They had already introduced a new Find control when they launched the beta last year. While they have fixed various bugs with the new Find controls, they are now addressing some of the suggestions users have submitted.

The first is that search options can now be navigated with the arrow keys. What’s more is that you can open the MRU list by just pressing the down key. This should make search options easier to find as pressing a key is much simpler than looking all over a UI for a specific list.

They are now adding back in more keyboard shortcuts from Visual Studio 2010 after customer feedback. You can now use Alt+C to toggle Match case or Alt+E to toggle regular expressions. This is still the beta so Microsoft will be adding in more keyboard shortcuts over time. You can get a list of all the currently available keyboard shortcuts for VS11 here.

The Find control is now resizable. This was apparently a “top customer request” and I can see why. Some terms are too long for the default size of the search box. This is especially true for searches involving regular expressions.

There have been some updates to the regular expression builder. It now supports .NET regular expressions as well some of the missing regular expressions from VS 2010. You can access these by clicking on the builder menu flyout.

A small change also came to the tab order. It’s now consistent with the dialog, which came after the Developer Preview provided this feedback.

There are a few bugs left, however, with one of them being fixed by a small extension. The first bug is that the shared scope and search options for Quick Find and Find in Files were common across the new Find control and the Find dialog. Microsoft claims its too risky to fix in the beta, so they have released this extension to fix it for the time being.

The other bug causes a COM exception every time a document is closed with an active incremental search. Like the last bug, this will be fixed after the beta ends. As a workaround now, you should close any incremental searches by pressing the Esc key before closing documents. If you do encounter the COM exception, just hit Ctrl+F and perform a Find Next.

This latest release should fix a lot of the complaints users have had with VS11. Microsoft says they are prioritizing bug fixes based on feedback so keep on sending them suggestions.

April 11, 2012
Visual Studio 11 Beta Improves Update Delivery

Visual Studio is an invaluable tool to developers and designers. It’s important that users receive important updates when they are issued. To that end, the Visual Studio is changing the way updates are delivered.

Over on the Visual Studio blog, the VS team says that bringing updates to users was an important feature that many people requested. The team looked at how other products update across the entire line of Windows and Microsoft software tools and found a good way to update users on changes to VS.

The update to, well, updating is called Visual Studio Update and is now available to users of the Visual Studio 11 beta. It notifies a user through the same notification method in which Windows Update uses. For those lucky enough to not be familiar with Windows Update, VSUpdate will bring up a little dialog box on the bottom right hand corner of the screen telling you that updates are available.

The actual process of updating is pretty simple though. You just click on the notification and it will bring up the Extension Manager. From there, head to updates, and then to the product updates section. There will be an update button here to click that will install the selected updates to Visual Studio 11. If the update notification becomes like Windows Update and pops up every ten seconds, you can control that too. Head to Tools and click Updates under Extension Manager. From here, select “Disable automatic detection of available updates.”

And wouldn’t you know it, the VS team is already using this new update method to roll out some fixes for the Visual Studio 11 beta. The fixes include performance improvements for large C# projects and addressing the “most frequently reported crashing issues.”

The most interesting part about the update process is how the team is going to keep it to the simple two-step process listed above. To keep it simple, they have to include all the VSUpdate packages that came before the current package. This means that they can’t release updates as soon as they’re ready or else it would get too big.

The VS team thinks this is a good first-step to improving the update process for Visual Studio. As long as it doesn’t spam the user constantly like Windows Update does, I can only see it as a good thing.

Is the new update method for Visual Studio Beta 11 a good thing to you? Or do you think the old update method was just fine? Let us know in the comments.

April 6, 2012
Microsoft Visual Studio 11 Getting More Visual With Updates

Developers take note – Microsoft is introducing some big changes to Visual Studio 11 that will hopefully make your job easier.

On the Visual Studio blog yesterday, Monty Hammontree, Director of User Experience in the Microsoft Developer Tools Division, laid out the changes the team is making to Visual Studio 11. The changes are focused on increasing efficiency of the developers working on new code. Microsoft has found that with the current set of tools, developers are only spending 15 percent of their time writing code.

To increase efficiency and fix what they perceive as problems with the program, Microsoft has outlined three problem areas:

Coping with tool overload. Visual Studio provides a large amount of information and capabilities that relate to your code. The sheer breadth and depth of capabilities that Visual Studio provides, at times, makes it challenging to find and make effective use of desired commands, options, or pieces of information.

Comprehending and navigating complex codebases and related artifacts (bugs, work items, tests etc.). Most code has a large number of dependencies and relationships with other code and content such as bugs, specs, etc. Chaining these dependencies together to make sense of code is more difficult and time-consuming than it needs to be due to the need to establish and re-establish the same context across multiple tools or tool windows.

Dealing with large numbers of documents. It is very common for developers to end up opening a large number of documents. Whether they are documents containing code, or documents containing information such as bugs or specs, these documents need to be managed by the developer. In some cases, the information contained in these documents is only needed for a short period of time. In other cases documents that are opened during common workflows such as exploring project files, looking through search results, or stepping through code while debugging are not relevant at all to the task the developer is working on. The obligation to explicitly close or manage these irrelevant or fleetingly relevant documents is an ongoing issue that detracts from your productivity.

Dealing with the first problem of tool overload, the Visual Studio team is changing four areas of the UI to make to reduce visual clutter. The four areas are command placements, colorized chrome, line work and iconography.

For command placements, the team has reduced toolbar command placements throughout the entire program by 35 percent. As an example, they have removed the cut, copy and paste commands from the toolbar because most developers use the keyboard shortcuts.

In previous versions of Visual Studio, many of the tools were colorized with bright colors and bold images. They have moved to a monochromatic color scheme in Visual Studio 11 so that users can focus on the tools instead of the colors.

To give users a choice, the Visual Studio 11 UI can be changed from light gray to a darker gray color. This allows users to choose which color compliments their work best.

Light UI:

Dark UI:

Line work has always been important to the UI for Visual Studio. The team at Microsoft, however, found that using boxes and gradients “drew attention away from developer content.” They are now using more typography and whitespace to create structure and emphasis.

The team has also changed the iconography to be more simplistic thus making it easier to understand each tool’s intended function. They do understand the change may confuse some users, but found through their own studies that users could still identify the tools based on the new glyph style.

Finally, the team is making it easier to find what they need to do their job. To this end, the team has made it possible to search for commands and configuration options through quick launch. Users can also search within tool windows and open files.

Microsoft hopes that the changes will make Visual Studio 11 feel lighter and less complex. It should also allow more room for developers to see their content.

As developers, what do you think of the changes coming to Visual Studio 11? Do they make the tools easier to use? Let us know in the comments.

February 24, 2012