Visual Studio 11 Beta Gets a New Look
A lot can happen in 6 months. After an initial preview last September, Microsoft is finally releasing the Visual Studio 11 and .NET Framework 4.5 beta products on February 29 with a 'Go Live' license for use in production environments.
The beta tooling coincides with the release of the highly anticipated Windows 8 Consumer Preview and the launch of the Windows Store for Metro-style apps. That may explain some of the design changes that appeared in the beta tooling during a sneak preview last week. The updates to the user interface suggested an immersive experience promoting Metro-style app development, with streamlined toolbars (35 percent reduction in command placements) and far less use of color, icons, and what Microsoft calls "line "work" (boxes, separators, bevels, gradients and shadows).
While Visual Studio 11 is in "lockstep" with the Windows 8 platform; developers who expect the upcoming IDE to serve as a mother ship, with baked-in tools for Windows Azure and Windows Phone development, may be a bit disappointed. The Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio will remain out-of-band extensions (that currently work with Visual Studio 2010 SP1) despite some added support in the upcoming IDE. The same holds true for Windows Phone Developer Tools, which do not require Visual Studio outside of the free Visual Studio Express for Windows Phone.
Even though Microsoft has reached the beta stage, the company has not finalized the upcoming Visual Studio SKU lineup or pricing, according to Jason Zander, corporate vice president of Visual Studio, and "Visual Studio 11" remains a codename.
"I think it will be similar to what we did in Visual Studio 2010 with respect to the makeup," Zander said. "So, we are not going to make a major change, like we did between 2008 and 2010 with respect to the roles, but we may add a SKU here or there, before we wind up shipping." He added, "But we are getting pretty close."
For now, the beta previews include Visual Studio 11 Ultimate, Visual Studio 11 Premium, Visual Studio 11 Professional and Visual Studio 11 Test Professional. An Express version of Team Foundation Server 11 is free for up to 5 users. That product is available, for the first time, as part of the beta previews. The company offered a free subset of TFS, which was called TFS Basic, with Visual Studio 2010.
You may have noticed that Microsoft has not provided a lot of data on performance enhancements in Visual Studio 11. Zander indicated that his team intends to share more data on performance in an upcoming Visual Studio Team blog. He cited one example of notable improvements when it comes to opening very large projects in Visual Studio. "We have examples, where that may have been like 2 minutes in Visual Studio 2010 and that same example is now down to 20 seconds," he said.
From an engineering perspective, the Visual Studio team has focused on improving areas such as virtual memory usage and responsiveness of the UI, according to Zander. "I am looking forward to having developers try out the beta and give us feedback on how we are doing," he said.
Check out the beta previews and express your thoughts on the coolest features of upcoming tooling, the new user experience, and some areas that you'd like to see Microsoft address. Drop me a line at krichards@1105media.com.
Posted by Kathleen Richards on 02/28/2012 at 5:42 PM