On Visual Studio 2010…

July 9, 2010 by Mark.

When I look at Visual Studio, I see a large toolbox that is well organized and labeled. Much so is the case with VS2010 as it was with its predecessor. However, my analogy is inadequate when it comes time to use VS2010 on a production level. To give you some back story, I’ve been using it since it was in the beta stages and like all beta software, it had its ugly side. It’s flashy GUI makes the user feel like they are working with a paintbrush rather than a chisel. Yes, the GUI is hardware accelerated and relies heavily on the graphics card for its eye pleasing outfit. The anal minimalist side of me started screaming the instant I found this out. Why should a development tool be using the graphics card for anything??

I compare the jump from VS2008 to VS2010 like the jump from Windows XP to Vista. You went from a product that was designed to be fast and responsive to a lumber hulk of over designed and needless fluff that pegs your hardware when too many tabs are open. Visual Studio is supposed to be a tool, not a piece of art. When you start weighing it down with flashy effects and ‘themes’, it becomes something akin to a video game, not a development environment.

Moving on, I was under the assumption that the Microsoft team improved the short comings of VS2008. With VS2010, they actually took a step (or several steps) backwards. You get up-to-date Intellisense errors as you type your code (like C# does), which is great. However, if you try to look up a function declaration, it won’t be able to find it, even if it’s in the same file, 20 lines up.

On a brighter note, the team actually fixed multi-core compiles. If you have a quad core machine, it will properly utilize the cores and compile your source much faster. This I like. It has a built in testing environment that is much better than VS2008’s version. Code coverage actually works well. Custom visualizers work better now and won’t crash the IDE when a complex data structure is thrown at it (like a hashmap).

VS2010 has the potential to be decent but if you really want to jump head first into it, I would suggest you wait for a service pack.

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