The Visual Studio Tech Roadmap -- Starring Visual Studio 2010

The Visual Studio Tech Roadmap — Starring Visual Studio 2010 | MS Tech News

Tue, 18 Nov 2008 22:28:41 GMT

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re: The Visual Studio Tech Roadmap -- Starring Visual Studio 2010

Steven Raybell — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 03:24:02 GMT

The thing that miffs me with WPF is cleartype. There's not facility whatsoever to turn it off, from what I can tell and have researched, for WPF based applications. This alone makes me worried to all heck about the future of my favorite IDE (and being a C# developer, this is even more important to me).

Please, please, please let me disable that mess that is cleartype. For me, it isn't clear, and gives me nearly instant eyestrain and headaches.

I'd hate to be forced to use fonts that don't fit my needs as well just so that I can have some supposed "new and exciting" interface in an arena where I just don't need it. I'd wager that other developers don't need to be graphically wowed by their IDE either.

I'm more than willing to even talk more in a one-on-one scenario as I, too, work here in Redmond. Heck, I'd even appreciate it to give my feedback further. :-)

I know of others that care about this as well, on my team no less. I'm sure they'd be interested as well.

re: The Visual Studio Tech Roadmap -- Starring Visual Studio 2010

Sam — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 05:50:41 GMT

Rico,

Great article and great direction to take this excellent product. I love the idea of integrating azure like features. Buddy coding would be great. An integrated iphone like app store for VS extensions would be great for the various extension developers.

I guess a few questions that tie in:

1. Will the new design of VS allow me, the end-user, to disable a bunch of features (because of the clean extensibility model) to such an extent that VS launches as fast as notepad and acts as fast as it? I know its not such a realistic example but I think it a really admirable goal.

2. Will the new design of VS allow me to better diagnose issues with visual studio. For example if my cpu suddenly jumps to 100% will I be able to find out that component XYZ is responsible, and disable it? I'm thinking something like Google chromes task manager ..

3. You did allude to API simplification on the extensibility side, I think this is fantastic, are you going to have the freedom to break backwards compatibility?

4. In a tie in question, what improvements are you looking at around profiling and diagnostics, a tool like ants profiler baked in perhaps?

Again, great article and I think you are on the right track.

On a side, fairly insignificant note compared to all the rest. Will you be looking at providing proper support for developing MCML apps in VS.Net? (I'm tired of pushing xml around) I've advocated for quite a while that they should get rid of that technology and replace it with WPF but it seems not to be happening ...

Cheers

Sam

re: The Visual Studio Tech Roadmap -- Starring Visual Studio 2010

Ryan Cromwell — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 05:54:12 GMT

I am very excited about the changes. I look forward to seeing tools like Resharper take full advantage of the new extensibility model and WPF-based editor.

Take it with a grain of salt, though, I'm a cheap sell for shiny objects.

re: The Visual Studio Tech Roadmap -- Starring Visual Studio 2010

JudahGabriel — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 07:34:54 GMT

Wow. Rico, I think you're the first person I've talked to in a long time that "gets it".

So many people are on either side of the camp: either the

"go back to VC6 luddites/we don't need no stinkin' gradients" camp

or the

"don't worry about how much resources we consume" camp.

Additionally, you're not saying, "Hey, I've got a brilliant idea. Let's rewrite the damn thing." Instead, you're taking the high road and doing a remodel.

I'm encouraged by what you've written in this post! And I'm really looking forward to Rico's VS2010!

re: The Visual Studio Tech Roadmap -- Starring Visual Studio 2010

danieldsmith — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 14:25:02 GMT

Moving over to WPF is fine if, and only if, it's not at the expense of *any* end user experience/functionality.

Microsoft is famous for not getting 100% there and then saying "that's as much as we could fit into a v1 release". Leaving any features that are replaced with WPF with reduced functionality is simply not an option.

If you can't at the very least keep the feature set on par, then it's absolutely not ready to be replaced with WPF.

Remember - developers are a picky and unforgiving lot!

re: The Visual Studio Tech Roadmap -- Starring Visual Studio 2010

Pop Catalin — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 14:36:04 GMT

VS10 and WPF is the most exciting thing about VS, ever :), I'm sure WPF will be used for much more than a pretty UI, it will be used for a more functional and dynamic UI. Finally something that gets me over excited about VS10.

WPF/Silverlight/XAML Web News – 2008-11-19

Rob Relyea - XAMLified — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 15:31:47 GMT

WPF Controls Jaime Rodriguez – Jaime did a quick port of the Chart controls from the Silverlight Toolkit

re: The Visual Studio Tech Roadmap -- Starring Visual Studio 2010

Anders Borum — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 16:22:12 GMT

Hi Rico,

It's great to see the emphasis on a more reponsible use of memory. Unfortunately, a lot of developers don't care about memory usage and subsequently end up with applications don't scale.

I agree with the WPF part. Using WPF as the graphics foundation for VS should definetely warrant a lot of focus for getting the best performance, features and scalability out of that graphics framework.

One thing that VS currently don't do very well is managing really large files (e.g. XML files of 64 or 128 MB). It's just not ideal to check these files for data using the IDE (other editors have better formance I'm sure, but I'd like to stick with VS).

Don't forget to keep us posted :-)

re: The Visual Studio Tech Roadmap -- Starring Visual Studio 2010

pingpong — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 17:10:43 GMT

I don't care about looks, but I can imagine lots of MS fanboys really need that.

Make VStudio responsive (like VC98 IDE) and scalable and I'll be happy. I don't really think you can achieve that with WPF in the product core. Good luck anyway.

re: The Visual Studio Tech Roadmap -- Starring Visual Studio 2010

R.J — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 01:15:05 GMT

IMO UI look is in a lot lower priority.

1. Performance

2. Extensibility

3. Low memory usage

4. Developer productivity

These are important to me.

I believe currently WPF is against #1 and #3.

Thanks,

re: The Visual Studio Tech Roadmap -- Starring Visual Studio 2010

Tanveer Badar — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 20:28:12 GMT

You hit it on the right spot. IDE literally dies when working on files with > 5K lines.

Please do something to improve that horrible experience, generations will worship you.

re: The Visual Studio Tech Roadmap -- Starring Visual Studio 2010

zdeslav — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 00:01:13 GMT

It's great to hear the next release will focus on extensibility and more efficient memory usage.

However, i don't see that much benefit in moving to WPF: "Do you really think GDI is the last word in computer graphics for the next 10 years?"

In all truth, VS2008 isn't really that much ahead of my old Turbo C 2.0 as you would expect from 20 years of constant improvement, but I guess that there will be people who will drool on eye candy.

The bigger issue for me is optimization of common tasks. You say: "The fact of the matter is that the existing VS codebase is far from ideal, and while we will certainly be loading more code at startup..."

The startup is not the only pain point, please also consider shutdown. I typically run 2 or 3 instances of VS, and when I try to close one or more, I have to wait for a long time, until finally I get tired and kill it in ProcessExplorer. This is a common scenario for me and most of my colleagues, and there are many other places when users have to wait because of some seemingly innocuous operation.

And as someone already noted: allow me to turn off everything I don't need, and tweak the environment to the way I prefer to work. That single improvement would make it worthwhile to move to VS2010.

re: The Visual Studio Tech Roadmap -- Starring Visual Studio 2010

JM — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 12:06:57 GMT

"Do you really think GDI is the last word in computer graphics for the next 10 years?"

My response? "For IDEs? I sure hope so."

Make it fast, make it scale, make it extensible. There's still too much to gain in these areas to be bold about eye candy.

And I know I'm being unfair when I'm dismissing a potential move to WPF as "eye candy", but the bar is very high if you want to create an interface that's radically more usable than what we've already got. Which I hope would be the point of moving to WPF.

IDEs aren't supposed to be wow material in the UI department, so what's with wanting it to be "modern" in the first place? It should mesh well with the OS, but beyond that, anything that doesn't translate to developer productivity gains is, IMO, a waste of human and technical resources.

I do see the benefit to MS for dogfooding their own UI technology in their flagship product, but that's more a service to WPF than it is to VS, and as a backend developer I'm more than slightly biased against it.

If the Chief-Architect doesn't decide... who does?

Community Blogs — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 13:41:26 GMT

Yesterday I read this great article about VS.NET's technical roadmap , posted by Rico Mariani . Rico

Weekly digest of interesting stuff

Steve Strong's Blog — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 18:19:50 GMT

Weekly digest of interesting stuff

re: The Visual Studio Tech Roadmap -- Starring Visual Studio 2010

willdean — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 23:02:06 GMT

Great post Rico, and great video with Paramesh on C9.

If it wasn't for you being on the VS team, the news about WPF in VS10 would have made me weep.

I was *so* glad to see that Anders managed to get a dig in about VS perf not once but *twice* in his PDC talk.

The current VS is shockingly bad for perf and I reckon 100M developers' hopes are pinned on *you* Rico to get it fixed. Don't fail us, please!

re: The Visual Studio Tech Roadmap -- Starring Visual Studio 2010

Wayne — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 00:02:23 GMT

Speed. 100% this is my biggest gripe. Asp.net solutions that take FOREVER to build and deploy and load, etc.

Do this for me, start filewatcher and then open a VS ASP.NET project. When you see 1000's of file open requests (duplicates in many cases) you will see the issue. What about build - dont get me started - there are 10s of 1000s of file open requests, checking and most are duplicates. The Hard drive is the slowest thing on a computer - so could you guys not figure out to use it as little as possible?

re: The Visual Studio Tech Roadmap -- Starring Visual Studio 2010

Fabrice — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 01:14:14 GMT

I strongly agree with Wayne. The best optimization that can be done is on speed, and most likely through better and fewer file accesses.

re: The Visual Studio Tech Roadmap -- Starring Visual Studio 2010

Peter — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 03:33:21 GMT

Great post and great suggestions in comments. Here's my list (in order of importance)

1) Ability to disable clear-type! I can't stress enough! I can't handle clear-type for more than a few minutes. Not sure about you guys, but I can see the pixel on my monitor, and that anti-aliasing makes things blurry, not clear.

2) Performance, performance, performance!

I can live with slow start-up, shut-down, or large memory usage. I really don't need animations or much glitz; I'll take it if it helps though. My #1 complaint with the current version is the ASPX editing (not the designer, I've given up on that a long time ago). It interrupts my flow all the time by giving me the hour glass -- may as well give me the finger. My understanding is that this is because of the background stuff that it needs to do and can't dump into a separate thread. If WPF can help here, then it can't come soon enough.

However, it needs to be so good that I won't even be able to know that it's WPF based. If you can't get the performance at least to the level of the current editor then please don't even try. Thanks.

P.S. Have I mentioned performance?!

re: The Visual Studio Tech Roadmap -- Starring Visual Studio 2010

Peter — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 03:39:47 GMT

Look at Paint.NET and look at SQL Server Management Studio. Both written in .NET, one feels like a WinForms application, the other doesn't. To be clear Paint.NET kicks SSMS's butt, so it can be done. I haven't played with Blend and other WPF applications yet.

re: The Visual Studio Tech Roadmap -- Starring Visual Studio 2010

Dimitris Staikos — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 17:55:37 GMT

Rico, your WPF reasoning sounds concise and may be even convincing, but you restrict yourselves down the same old path of "dogfooding new and cool windows technologies".

Why don't you take a shot at a paradigm shift for a change? Why don't you hire 3-4 game developers in your team, experts in 3D, custom UIs and *performance*, and then build a whole new IDE that is NOT a windows application at its core but a DirectX "game"? I have seen mind-blasting UIs from game devs (not in the games themselves but in the dev tools for the games). I am sure you can find a couple of super-highly-talented game devs to add to the picture.

Warm Regards

re: The Visual Studio Tech Roadmap -- Starring Visual Studio 2010

Wyatt — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 17:45:45 GMT

All I want out of VS2010 is for the RAM usage not to double. I run a lot of IDE instances (I have 5 copies of VS2008 running now), and everytime I've upgraded to a new version of Visual Studio, I have to double the RAM in my machine.

VS2003 - 1GB

VS2005 - 2GB

VS2008 - 4GB

At the rate this is going, VS2010 is going to require a 64-bit OS.

揭示Visual Studio 2010发展路线图

墙头草 — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 11:54:09 GMT

RicoMariani，VisualStudio的首席架构师，近期谈到了有关VisualStudio2010长期计划的情况。在我们跟进此事之前，Rico先来了个预防针：

我是首席架构师，但是...

[記事リンク]Visual Studio 2010のロードマップ

おぎわら@.NET道場 Blog(わんくま編) — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 21:24:07 GMT

[記事リンク]Visual Studio 2010のロードマップ

re: The Visual Studio Tech Roadmap -- Starring Visual Studio 2010

CurlyFro — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 18:24:08 GMT

how about stepping up the client side IDE for better intellisense and debugging?

re: The Visual Studio Tech Roadmap -- Starring Visual Studio 2010

TraumaPony — Sat, 13 Dec 2008 10:40:19 GMT

As a game developer, I'm worried about WPF hogging the GPU during testing.

Also, you repeatedly make the point "could your mother tell the difference between VC6 and VS08?" My response to that is, "does it matter?" I couldn't care less that my IDE looks like something straight from 1998. Why does it have to -look- new, if it already has so many new features?

On the other hand, I'm definitely looking forward to it. Just as long as I don't have to relearn the GUI, and it doesn't use too many resources.