First Look At Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 236
snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Martin Heller takes VS2010 Beta 1 for a test drive and finds the upgrade promising, particularly with regard to improved thread debugging and a revamped UI. But the biggest enhancements have to do with parallel programming, Heller writes. 'I'm not sure that I've completely grasped the power of the new .Net Framework and native C++ support for task and data parallelism in VS2010, but what I've seen so far is impressive.' Heller points to intriguing parallel programming samples posted to CodePlex and offers numerous screenshots of VS2010 Beta 1 functionality. He also notes that the beta still lacks support for ASP.Net MVC, smart devices, and the .Net Micro Framework."
Yay! (Score:1, Interesting)
Visual Studio is the best!
Seriously.
More security? (Score:3, Interesting)
Look at that fourth screenshot. What possible harm could loading a project do, I wonder? Does it already (partially?) execute even when it is just sitting there in the development environment? Is this an attempt to banish evil compilers from accidentally compiling source?
And why is the answer always "make the user choose" even though there is absolutely no way to make an informed choice (same problem as with UAC or sudo: I don't want to hand over the keys to the kingdom, I only want to give out narrow and specific permissions, based on useful information, rather than some nebulous feeling of 'trust')?
Themes (Score:2, Interesting)
Whenever MS apps get themes, Office 2k7 for example, they get slower. I'll admit VS 2k10 does look nicer, it really does, but even my Core i7 with cheetah blood thermal compound sits there drawing slow UI. MS, please use native widgets, allow us to disable theming, or whatever it takes to make it go as fast as 2k8.
Not just parallel (Score:5, Interesting)
ParallelFX is definitely interesting, but I'd say that another very major addition is Visual F# [wikipedia.org] - to the best of my knowledge, this is the first time a primarily functional language goes mainstream, and gets documentation, tooling (IDE/debugging/profiling), and general support on par with the likes of C# and VB. It's not Haskell (read: no typeclasses), and it's not quite OCaml either (no functors), even though the core language is recognizably ML. But it's got most of the nice FP bits OCaml has to offer, some syntactic sugar on top of that (e.g. ability to declare locals as mutable when needed, and arithmetic operators overloaded for all numeric types), and it's got direct and full access to one of the largest class libraries on the market today.
(I'm sure someone will remind me of Scala, which is in many ways similar to F#. It's definitely comparable, but its tooling support is lagging behind, and, most importantly, it's not backed by any of the "big players" in Java land - not Sun, not Google, not IBM - or indeed, any other company.)
The second, smaller, but still interesting bit is improved language interop. It seems that, as new core (i.e. MS-supported) .NET languages are added to the batch, the framework itself is extended as needed to provide primitives for them where more than one language uses them. For example, both F# and IronPython work with tuples, but they have previously each defined their own type for that - and so .NET 4 introduces the standard System.Tuple type, and all languages are changed to use that. So now you can actually make a tuple in IronPython, and pattern-match it in F# - nice.
Another bit along the same lines is C# 4 dynamic type [wikipedia.org] - which is nothing but opt-in duck typing - and the associated DLR framework for exposing runtime dynamic type information in a common way. This means that static/dynamic language interop on .NET is now two-way - previously, you could easily call C# class methods from IronPython/IronRuby, but there was no easy way to call methods on IronPython/IronRuby objects in C# - but now you can do the latter just as easily.
Anyone still using Visual Studio 6? (Score:3, Interesting)
VC6, to me, is the '57 Chevy of IDEs; it's out of date, lacking in features, isn't to everyone's tastes, but just keeps on runnin' with a strange magic that Microsoft has never been able to reproduce in its later versions. I've used every VS version since 2, and all the versions after 6 were plagued by bugginess, general slowness, and, here's the real subjective part, a feeling of fragility that I never experienced with VC6. I have used VS8 quite a bit and while I appreciate having a more up-to-date compiler (stupid BS "security warnings" aside), VC6 still, for whatever reason, remains the IDE I want to use if I have to write Windows-specific C++.
Frankly, I don't *want* to use VC6, just like I don't want to put a bottle of lead-substitute into my gas tank every time I fill up, it's just that it has that perfect mix of speed, usefulness, and the ability to get out of my way that none of the .net versions have been able to capture.
Re:Themes (Score:3, Interesting)
Yup, but you can't dock things onto both monitors. Which is a shame, because if you could configure everything with docking and then save the settings per task it'd rock.
Imagine being able to configure the IDE for the following function with full docking:
a) Form design. Form designer with toolbox on one screen. Codebehind with solution explorer and the build/fault box on the other.
b) Object orientated development. Code window on one screen, vertically orientated widescreen, book style. Class and Solution explorer on the second screen, orientated horizontally. Probably space for an webbrowser / documentation there too.
c) Debugging. Debug screens one one screen (code window, console, call stack, watch window) and production code the other (same as most people do in 2005).
If I could define those configurations, save them to the menu and then change at will it'd rock.
Re:Anyone even using VS 2008 yet? (Score:4, Interesting)
Eclipse does C++ refactoring, I think Netbeans can do it too. I've used Eclipse for renaming values, implementing methods and generating getters/setters, it didn't ever break anything and showed all code that was about to be changed before doing something irreversible. Even if it breaks something, there's Local History which acts as a simple version control server, committing code on every save operation.
If a compiler can parse the code, the IDE should be capable of doing that.
Re:Yay! (Score:5, Interesting)
Screw it, I second this. Visual Studio has the best code completion implementation ever written. I can type lines like obj.GetSomething().Append(item) in about four keystrokes.
Have you tried IntelliJ IDEA? It's Java-only, but I found its code completion to be many, MANY times better than VS. For one, instead of showing you every symbol that matches a prefix, it narrows down to the appropriate type.
For example, in VS, if you create two methods with similar names ("int Test1()", "string Test2()"), and try and tab complete something like string "foo = T", it'll show you Test1() first, even though Test2() is a far better match.
Note that I use VS 2008 daily, and I've got 2010 installed as well. I just tested that in VS 2010, and it still shows you every single identifier available, including class names. I know that technically, the intention may have been to reference a static, but in practice, they could go to some lengths to select a "most likely" set and an "alphabetical" set, and show the most likely first, and only show the complete set if you try to complete twice, or something.
It's a great IDE, but it could be a lot better. Microsoft really needs to get over their "not invented here" attitude, install a competing IDE at least ONCE, try it, and learn that other people sometimes do things better.
Re:Yay! (Score:0, Interesting)
If you were my employee I would fire you.
Re:Yay! (Score:3, Interesting)
I would concur that when it comes to code completion and refactoring, IntelliJ IDEA still beats everyone, and NetBeans and Eclipse generally beat VS when you compare apples to apples (i.e. Java to C#). You can get to roughly the same level if you add ReSharper (which isn't exactly surprising, as it's made by the same guys who make IDEA), but that's extra $$$ ...
On the other hand, Visual C++ still has the most reliable C++ code completion of all IDEs that I've seen, and it's got even better in VS2010.
Re:Anyone even using VS 2008 yet? (Score:2, Interesting)
I tried Eclipse while in College and it was god awful slow compare to Visual Studio(.Net 1.1). I have not tried Eclipse since.
And this is supposed to be relevant now, how?
I've actually found that all versions of Visual Studio are unbearable slow, even if you have 4GB of RAM, have recent hardware, and it's the only thing running. 2005 was actually slower than 2003. 2008 is about the same speed as 2005 in my subjective observations, though it is doing more in the background now, so I guess its a net gain.
Eclipse is blazing fast in comparison, and I don't consider Eclipse to be any sort of speed demon. If it's slow for you, you probably just haven't tweaked the JVM settings yet (which is necessary, especially if you use a lot of plugins). Also remember that, by default, it's constantly compiling every change you make (at least in Java), but you can turn that off if you like (I don't, I like my compilation errors reported right away).
I'd of course rather be using Emacs than either of those pigs, and use it for anything that's not Java/C#. It's funny, because back in the day Emacs was the pig. Now it's lightweight in comparison to the alternatives.