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New Visual Studio 2012 Debugging Features for the Windows 8 App Lifecycle Model
Windows 8 brings a new app lifecycle model, in which Windows Store apps are automatically managed for the user. These apps always feel alive, even though they never run when they’re off the screen. This provides great benefits for power consumption and battery life. Here are a few related blog posts we recommend for background reading on this topic: In this post, we’ll take a look at what this all means for debugging. Of all the debugging advances we made in Visual Studio 2012 (from JavaScript debugging, to the Windows 8 Simulator, to remote debugging on Windows RT devices), the debugging expe...
Visual Studio 2012 released to the web!
On August 15th, we announced the release of Visual Studio 2012 to the web! Make sure to visit Somasegar’s Blog for the announcement, and if you haven’t downloaded yet, check out Jason Zander’s Blog for 12 reasons to upgrade. There was a lot of buzz across the blogs, so here’s a rollup of additional posts you might want to read about the release: Start Downloading MSDN Subscribers can download from the MSDN Subscriber Download Page. For free trial and Express versions, these releases are available on our Visual Studio product website. To learn more about Visual St...
Improved Toolbox Performance Delivers Highly Responsive Visual Studio 2012
As mentioned in the previous performance post on Typing and Editing we would follow with a post on the improvements to Visual Studio 2012 from enhancements in the Toolbox. I would like to introduce Duke Kamstra and Chuck England from two teams in Visual Studio to describe to you the work done to improve responsiveness via the Toolbox. Visual Studio is packed with awesome rapid application development features. Sometimes getting all of these great features comes at a price. Producing Intellisense, red squiggles, smart rename, refactoring, etc. can require quite a bit of work. As features have become more versat...
The Visual Studio 2012 Feedback Tool: A better way to submit bugs
Microsoft Visual Studio has had a long and successful run over the last decade plus, and much of that success has been through the partnership with our customers along the way. We believe that you can build better products through better conversations, and our feedback channels are intended to help us listen and respond to the things you tell us as you work with our products on a daily basis. With upwards of 50 million lines of code, broad changes to Visual Studio can take some time to fully incorporate. This can make it seem like we are not listening, but in truth, we spend extensive time reading, responding,...
A World of Samples at your Fingertips
Samples are the primary way that we as developers learn to develop applications for a new platform. We use samples as a starting point to learn about new APIs, we reference them when we hit bugs in our own code and need a comparison, and we share them for others to learn from our discoveries. If a picture is worth a thousand words then a sample is worth thousand pages of documentation. With Visual Studio 2012 we set out to give developers easy access to find and use samples, especially when building applications for Windows 8. We first looked at the collection of samples we already had, and those we planned to a...
Visual Studio Express 2012 for Windows Desktop
With Visual Studio 2012, we strive to provide the best development experience across all Microsoft platforms. This includes enabling developers to bring to life the richness of Windows desktop applications - whether you are learning to build your first app or whether you’ve been developing on Microsoft platforms for many years. A few weeks ago, we shared our plans for the Express editions of Visual Studio 2012. As we've worked to deliver the best experience with Visual Studio for our platforms with Windows 8, Windows Phone, and for Web and Windows Azure, we heard from our community that developers want to have...
A DESIGN WITH ALL-CAPS
Let’s talk about the all-caps menus. When we shared the RC design preview with you, we expected the uppercase menu would generate mixed feedback and emotions. We had seen similar reactions from early adopters and from our own internal users prior to posting about it. Rest assured that we’ve heard you, and we’ve been thinking through what should be done here. Using uppercase for the menus was not an arbitrary decision, and I think it will help the discussion to frame why we made this change. We’ve chosen to use uppercase styling in the top menu for two main reasons: 1) to keep Visual Stud...
Announcing the Microsoft “Roslyn” June 2012 CTP
In Soma’s previous blog post, we announced the first CTP of the Roslyn project. Roslyn is a forward looking project that enables the C# and VB compilers to be used as a service. Today, as Jason Zander discusses in more detail, we’re excited to announce the second Roslyn CTP – with full support for Visual Studio 2012 RC. You can get the CTP from http://msdn.com/Roslyn/, or go directly to the download. We’ve also released a NuGet Package that includes the Roslyn Compiler APIs and pieces that do not have a dependency on Visual Studio. Support for Visual Studio 2012 RC This version of the Ro...
Setup Improvements for Visual Studio
Setup is the first experience most of us have of Visual Studio, and in the Visual Studio 2012 we’ve made significant investments in improving your experience. Many of you have already told us you like our new setup user interface (thank you!). We have also been investing in ratcheting up the speed at which we lay bits down, improving the experience for non-English installations, and honing the experience you use to select which components to install. Let’s start by looking at the last of these first. As many of you noted, the Visual Studio 2012 (11) beta didn’t have the capability to customize ...