{"id":1323,"date":"2012-02-23T02:05:00","date_gmt":"2012-02-23T02:05:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/visualstudio\/2012\/02\/23\/introducing-the-new-developer-experience\/"},"modified":"2022-10-10T13:11:47","modified_gmt":"2022-10-10T20:11:47","slug":"introducing-the-new-developer-experience","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/visualstudio\/introducing-the-new-developer-experience\/","title":{"rendered":"Introducing the New Developer Experience"},"content":{"rendered":"

UPDATE:<\/strong> We hear you. There\u2019s a lot of excitement about this release and a lot of passion about colors, designs, styles and icons. Know that we are listening to all your comments here, across social media and we are working hard to make Visual Studio 11 a fast, powerful and feature-rich product. Keep the comments coming, both good and bad. We are reading them all.<\/p>\n

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In this blog post (and the one that will follow) we\u2019d like to introduce a few of the broad reaching experience improvements that we\u2019ve delivered in Visual Studio 11. We\u2019ve worked hard on them over the last two years and believe that they will significantly improve the experience that you will have with Visual Studio.<\/p>\n

Introduction<\/b><\/h2>\n

We know that developers often spend more of their time than they would like orienting themselves to the project and tools they are working with and, in some cases, only about 15% of their time actually writing new code. This is based on observations we\u2019ve made in our research labs and observations that other independent researchers have made (for example, take a look at this<\/a> paper). Obviously you need to spend some time orienting yourself to your code and tools, but wouldn\u2019t it be good to spend more time adding new value to your applications? In Visual Studio 11 we\u2019ve focused on giving you back more time by streamlining your development experience. Through thoughtful reduction in user interface complexity, and by the introduction of new experience patterns that simplify common workflows, we\u2019ve targeted what we observed to be three major hurdles to developer efficiency.<\/p>\n

The problem areas we targeted are:<\/p>\n

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  1. 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.<\/li>\n
  2. 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.<\/li>\n
  3. 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.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Developer Impact<\/b><\/h2>\n

    In the remainder of this post we\u2019ll describe in a lot more detail how we have given you more time to focus on adding value to your applications by reducing UI complexity in VS 11. In tomorrow\u2019s post we\u2019ll go into details regarding the new experience patterns we\u2019ve introduced to simplify many of your common development workflows. The overall effect of the changes we\u2019ve introduced is that Visual Studio 11 demands less of your focus, and instead allows you to focus far more on your code and the value that you can add to your applications.<\/p>\n

    Improved Efficiency through Thoughtful Reduction<\/b><\/h2>\n

    Developers have repeatedly and passionately shared with us the degree to which tool overload is negatively impacting their ability to focus on their work. The effort to address these challenges began during development of VS 2010 and continues in VS 11 today. In VS 2010 we focused on putting in place the engineering infrastructure to enable us to have fine grained control over the look and feel of Visual Studio.<\/p>\n

    With this as the backdrop we set out in Visual Studio 11 to attack the tool overload challenge through thoughtful yet aggressive reduction in the following areas:<\/p>\n