VS 2010 Beta 1: User Interface

Well, I’ve been browsing through Visual Studio 2010 for a while now. I’ve not gotten into coding but did get a chance to have a look at the User Interface for this product. Here are some of the things I’ve noticed.

1. WPF is in: Oh yes, you heard right! The start page uses WPF for a clean and slick use. Have a look at the start screen (image in the gallery at the bottom)

2. New context highlighting: Its bigger and better than ever! The editor looks slicker that ever before and I’m loving every byte of it ;)

3. Changed Intellisense drop down menu: I must admit, my favourite part of the VS editor is its code intellisense and they have changed things up a bit in this department. I must admit though, I haven’t figured out what the Ctrl+Alt+Space exactly does :(

4. Inbuilt support for Office projects: Want to write managed code extentions for Office products? Go right ahead. Start your work out of the box ;) I believe you don’t need to export PIA with your projects any more. (More on this in a technical detail post)

5. F# supported OOB: I’m sure you have heard of F#, the object oriented functional programming language. Well, it isn’t an outcast any more. :P Visual Studio 2010 has full support for the language. No more need for downloading and installing separate binaries. :)

One thing still remains the same. The installer takes a lot of time to finish up the entire process. Also, .NET Framework 4.0 Beta 1 asked me for a reboot before proceeding with the rest of the installer (Don’t remember 3.5/2.0 asking for reboots in prior Visual Studios). I dislike installers asking me to reboot but I especially hate it when it doesn’t give me an option to restart later ¬¬. The installer isn’t going to go ahead either way. The rest will be completed after reboot. You should let me restart later ;( I’ll make sure I mention that in my feedback to the VS team :)

There are a lot of videos out there about Visual Studio. You might want to check out channel 9 for 10-4. The 10-4 shows are downloadable so you can get the weekly video podcast whenever you want :)

Au revoir! *[PIA]: Primary Interop Assemblies *[OOB]: Out of the Box

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