Visual Studio 2010 - Code focused development and Lab Management
I have talked in the past few weeks about the various pillars and features of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Fx 4.
Today, I want to drill into one of the pillars a little bit more. We want to make sure that Visual Studio is your favorite application to use – as part of “Inspiring Developer Delight”. To that end, we are working on features that target code-focused development. Here are a couple of features that illustrate the kinds of things we are doing.
Navigating through code can be a pain point. One of the things that we want to simplify is for you to be able to do a quick search to find what you need that is supported across all our major languages. As you type in what you want to search for in the quick search dialog box, the results get automatically filtered.
We also want to make it easier for you to do consume-first development with a feature we call “generate from usage”. This feature gives you the ability to generate a type, constructor, method, or property by inferring it’s usage in code. Basically, it allows you to just think about what you want your program to do and the IDE will generate the building blocks you need around you.
As much as we are building a great set of features out of the box for code focused development, we know that there will always be more that can be done to help out productivity. Developers do want to add additional functionality or customizations to make them more productive and effective. We are investing heavily on modernizing our editor and IDE to support better extensibility that allows the community and third parties to extend and customize their VS experience in a much easier way than ever before. We have replaced the editor of Visual Studio with a WPF version that is built on the Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) and .NET Framework 4.0. The extensibility model of the editor allows you to build rich syntax highlighting that includes multiple font faces and font heights, draw WPF visuals on the editor surface, add data to or customize the presentation of IntelliSense features, and create scenarios where you view only a part of a buffer or aggregate code from several buffers into a new view over the code. These extensions can be installed simply by copying a .dll to a components folder and VS will automatically pick it up next time it is launched.
We have already talked about a lot of the Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) features, but one we haven’t talked about is the Test Lab Manager functionality in VSTS 2010. It makes building up and tearing down testing environments easier, and helps developers get past the dreaded "no repro" bugs. The functionality found in Test Lab Manger will significantly reduce the time it takes you to setup, tear down, and restore virtual environments to a clean state. It will allow testers to file rich bugs including links to environment checkpoints that developers can use to recreate complex multi-tiered environments – another step toward getting past the “no repro” bug. It will also improve build quality by automating virtual machine provisioning, build deployment, and build verification testing in an integrated fashion.
This week Channel 9 is doing a set of videos on these new Visual Studio 2010 features. Also, you can download virtual PC images of the Community Technology Preview for Visual Studio 2010 and see the product in action.
Namaste!
Comments
Anonymous
November 10, 2008
PingBack from http://www.tmao.info/visual-studio-2010-code-focused-development-and-lab-management/Anonymous
November 10, 2008
really good features, congratulation after all these years you've finally made it. but wait, has any1 heard about a product named resharper?Anonymous
November 10, 2008
2nd tcmaster Is this really a good use of time? http://www.jetbrains.com/resharperAnonymous
November 10, 2008
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November 10, 2008
So where does Quick Search fit in the heirachy of Ctrl+I, Ctrl+Shift+F, Ctrl+D, and Ctrl+F3? (Not counting all the object browser and other tools' finds!) Also, I hope you can keep the startup and memory usage from degrading compared to previous versions with WPF, I've found (with older versions of WPF at least) the startup of WPF itself to be quite prohibitive.Anonymous
November 10, 2008
(Sorry for the double post...) Also, any chance you could talk about C++ changes? For example, I remember statements about the compiler being refactored (rewritten?) so the IDE could use it to get much deeper, more accurate information. Any timeframe on C++0x features implementation, now the standard has a stable feature set? (SP1? VS 2012?)Anonymous
November 11, 2008
Hi Simon, We are doing a number of interesting things with C++ in the VS 2010 product. I will talk about that sometime soon. -somasegarAnonymous
November 11, 2008
I got a chance to talk to the channel9 folks the other day about this and more in terms of some of the things that we are building in VS 2010 and .NET FX 4. You can check it out here: http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/VisualStudio/Soma-on-the-Key-Themes-for-Visual-Studio-2010/ -somasegarAnonymous
November 11, 2008
Many developers just accept the Visual Studio defaults, so please provide a better default font. Concolas and Inconsolata are my favorites but 'anything' would be better than Courier New! http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000969.htmlAnonymous
November 11, 2008
VS is my favorite development app to use. But it will not be my favorite app overall until you take a real hard look at performance. VS 2008 is much better than 2005. But it is still a fat, slow, inefficient application that gobbles up memory worse than any other app (except IE7!) and given enough time can bring even new dev machines down to a crawl. You need to get better here.Anonymous
November 11, 2008
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November 11, 2008
Mark, I disagree with you. VS.NET is by far the best development product out there. Adding WPF enhancements to it will not only help developers work more efficiently but also keep them excited about working with a cool tool. Developers are human beings too, and they remain excited about cool UI as normal users do. What older technologies are you referring to? Soma, thanks for all the good work you and Microsoft are doing and don't be distracted by some comments that merely criticize. Constructive criticism and suggestions for improvement help. Like, how about providing a search in Visual Studio like Expression Blend 2? (Not aware if this exists via a 3rd party add-in)Anonymous
November 11, 2008
Hi Soma Visual Studio 2010 looks great. I also agree Visual Studio is the best IDE out there and I must say I am loving Visual Studio 2008. These features are adding to an already great product. And the MEF is a great concept. I was looking for something like this years ago, but like so many others developed my own plugin standard as there was nothing else out there. Keep up the great work.Anonymous
November 12, 2008
Publicación del inglés original : Lunes, 10 de noviembre de 2008 7:18:00 AM PST por Somasegar He tratadoAnonymous
November 12, 2008
Thanks Adam. Hopefully, you will find MEF to enable you to create plug-ins a lot more easily than ever before. -somasegarAnonymous
November 13, 2008
After more than a year that we have been working on Lab Management, we have announced the product lastAnonymous
November 14, 2008
I'll be the cynical here. VS editor is already slow enough when it is native code. Imagine what it will do when it is heavy weight WPF graphics! I spend 12 hours of my life daily with badly designed classes (read 6K+ lines) and the editor hangs after typing a single token. I'll be staying out of VS2010's path for such projects.Anonymous
November 16, 2008
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November 19, 2008
After more than a year that we have been working on Lab Management, we have announced the product lastAnonymous
December 08, 2008
Love what you did with the quick search....I mean I had used that sort of thing in Eclipse..but since I put my focus on programming in <a href="http://www.notionsolutions.com">VS</a> i had missed that feature..so I was more than just happy when I read what you have done...Cheers!Anonymous
December 31, 2008
Please, I beg you to provide an option to opt out of WPF editor! I looked at another WPF app, Expression Blend that has a sloooooooow GUI. I mean like 250ms vs 20ms, but for a fast typist it is really annoying to be dealing with these little Java-like delays. Visual Studio has been getting slower with every release, so is this a joke calling it the new VC6 while adding WPF bloatware? Please focus on functionality and not on prettiness. It is silly that to add a feature like scalable font you have to replace a working editor with a rewrite which means new bugs and new performance issues. This endless cycle of rewrites and getting some new stuff mixed in with performance issues is getting tiring.Anonymous
January 01, 2009
Bz, We didn't rewrite the editor just to add WPF support and scalable fonts. We also rewrote it to improve scalability for dealing with larger files, larger numbers of regions, and improve multi-threading support (see RICOM's comments above for more details). Our expectation is that for small to medium sized files and projects you should see performance comparable to VS2008, and better performance for larger files and projects. On your experience with Expression Blend, I agree that typing performance should be well under 250 ms. I'd like to understand what you're seeing a little better, if you can send me some more information (devperf@microsoft.com) about your system and where you see the performance problems, I'd appreciate it. Regards, David Berg - Microsoft Developer Division Performance Engineering TeamAnonymous
January 01, 2009
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February 13, 2009
Please the problem is I can not record from datein to CD please somthing wrong.Anonymous
February 28, 2009
In a blog post in November , I mentioned a feature called “Quick Search” - one of the code focused featuresAnonymous
March 06, 2009
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November 18, 2009
Are there any new datagrid properties that will lock the header, or turn on vertical or horizontal scrollbars?