S. Somasegar is the corporate vice president of the Developer Division at Microsoft. Learn more about Somasegar.
I am very happy to announce that the Visual Studio 11 Beta and .NET 4.5 Beta releases are now available for download.
I previously blogged about some of the innovation that went into the Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview releases at //BUILD/:
Since //BUILD/, we’ve been hard at work on the beta releases, and I’m excited at the improvements that have been made on the feature sets previously shown, as well as on the slew of new functionality and value that’s been added.
For a more in-depth view on these beta releases, see Jason Zander’s blog. And for those of you yearning to learn more about how to build great apps for Windows 8, check out the new Windows 8 app developer blog.
Since the Visual Studio 11 “sneak peek” event held on Thursday, we’ve been listening intently to all of the feedback you’ve provided. We very much appreciate the comments you’ve shared with us, and we look forward to hearing more from you once you’ve begun using the beta bits.
Namaste!
i'm very happy too :)
i can't wait to try it and the new amazing features :D
Can vs2011 beta be installed side-to-side with vs2010? I mean if I can have them both installed
HoOz_Malhas, great, we look forward to hearing your thoughts and feedback.
jim, yes, you can install and use Visual Studio 11 Beta alongside Visual Studio 2010.
Do we need to UNinstall the previous VS11 (preview) first before installing this VS11 Beta? (0r will the installer take care of that?
Mike, you will need to uninstall Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview before installing Visual Studio 11 Beta. There are more details on this on the download page: www.microsoft.com/.../downloads.
Although I'm excited about this release, I'm a little disappointed that some of the blocking issues I had with the developer preview still are not fixed in the VS 11 beta/win8 consumer preview.
For example, where is WriteableBitmap.Render? I was hoping to be able to finally get started on an app that needed some form of WriteableBitmap.Render functionality, but that functionality appears to be completely missing.
I can't make any kind of image composition apps using XAML without the ability to render XAML UI to an image. Right now the only option I have is to NOT implement the share charm, and let it "default" to take a screenshot (or I suppose I could make either an HTML app or a DirectX app - neither are ideal options). The strange thing is that the printing API lets me print directly from XAML, which I'm assuming requires some kind of rasterization (probably it uses an undocumented API).
Oh dear, half an hour and I am going back to VS2010 already... WAY too slow (sits on 25% CPU even when idle??!! single core machine) and I miss all the extras that Productivity Power Tools extension has.
Also, while I was open minded about the grey theme, turns out all the knockers were right, it is horrible, VS 2010 is so much better to use and look at.
DO like the search box in menu strip at top - that's all I can think of for now.
:(
Looks like the Pro edition received code analysis and a profiler for C++ - that is the good.
BUT, the new theme is AWFUL:
1) The worst thing are the tiny monochrome icons in Solution Explorer. When I look at them it makes me want to cry because they all look very similar. I want to emphasize that the problem with the new icons is not that they are gray (you could give each one a different color if you want). The problem is that the icons consist of a single color. Having multiple colors in an icon helps to make it recognizable. Even the bigger icons in "New Project" window are jarring because they are a single color.
2) The lack of edges in the windows, tabs, etc., is confusing.
3) The docked window tabs read "SOLU...", "PERF...", "COD...", "TEA...", "TOO..." but they have no color icons!
I don't like the Dark theme either. I have every version of Visual Studio since VC++ 4.0. I will continue to use the old versions until you fix the theme. I'm sorry, but I won't use the beta version with this confusing flat gray theme. I already paid for my MSDN renewal, now I will wait for you to fix the problem.
Yes, the new theme is just dreadful, truly truly dreadful.
I spent about 2 hours just trying to see if I could rebuild my Silverlight app in it. No joy.
I would say VS crashed at least 10 - 12 times. I sent the watson reports each time.
Any time I went to open a XAML file, VS just locked up permanently and I had to kill it from Task manager.
When I opened my Silverlight project it needed to convert the project files. This wanted to checkout all files from TFS but I wanted to just work Offline. No matter what I tried to remove my TFS credentials, VS kept readding them on me automatically. I tried deleting stored credentials from the credential manager, removing the TFS from VS settings, just about everything but it kept adding it back in.
In the end I just had to give up. The monochrome icons were just too much of a strain on the eye. the new TFS - Pending Changes is very difficult to read too and it's much more clumsier on how you select which files you want to/not want to check in. The checked listbox is gone.
ok
@Adam, thanks for letting us know that you're having trouble working with XAML files in Visual Studio 11 Beta. ("Any time I went to open a XAML file, VS just locked up permanently and I had to kill it from Task manager.")
We'd appreciate it if you'd send us your project so we can look into what might be causing the issue. You can email it to BlendInsider@microsoft.com.
You can also read more about Blend and the VS11 XAML Designer that we just released on our team blog blendinsider.com/.../visual-authoring-for-the-windows-8-consumer-preview-with-blend-and-visual-studio-2012-02-29
Worse then 2010. Crash, Performance issues, Ugly UI. Just when I thought it couldn't get worse it did.
VS's only accomplishment: the degree by which you managed to lower users expectations.
How does it feel to write to software the doesn't work and people don't like ?
I never seen a development environment as bad Visual Studio 2011 then have to lie in you blogs to carry the corporate line that this software works and actually does something useful. I would seek another job if I were you. I suppose money is worth more then integritiy. I guess maybe in 490 years what you blog about make actually be here. If you want to help developers abandon Visual Studio and .NET, how many years does it take you to realize this paradigm doesn't work.
I often wonder if you have followed Visual Studio 6.0 design patterns how far ahead developers would be instead instead of placing us back in the dark ages of software development and now you are playing catch up to open source.
Seriously I would fire everyone that ever wrote I line of code in .NET and Visual Studio.
Dave, I'm sorry to hear you've had such a negative experience. Can you provide more details on what are your specific concerns / what are the exact problems you've run into? Thanks.
I have to agree, the new theme is dreadful. The Developer Preview was really good, why spoil it?
As well as the new features in VS we also need a top flight front-end web editor to work both independently and alongside VS. Expression Web can and should be that editor but needs urgent update for the mobile space.