Visual Studio 11 Beta version is released recently. I’m to download and replace my VS2010, while i’m in the middle of some risky projects. How do you find it?
There are many aspects that I wish I can ride of them by putting VS2010 away:
- Single Edmx diagram: It’s very important to create separated (splitted) edmx files for large data models.
- Weak garbage collection and memory management: Installing some or many extensions ends to memory problems and exceptions.
- Weak modeling tools: one unanswered problem of mine is an example. Also, I couldn’t check my layers references using layer diagram or other kind of available diagrams.
There are many other points, that you and me faced with them.
How’s the VS 11 Beta? How did you find it? What are benefits and risks?
I wouldn’t replace it. In fact, the user interface is a disaster and was the first thing to make me revolt and uninstall it after ten minutes of use. Now, a user interface doesn’t stop me from doing work, sure, but this was so far from an improvement that I won’t be touching it until Microsoft brings back some colour into the icons. Even then, the idea that mono-colour glyphs are easier for humans to perceive amongst a sea of other same-coloured glyphs on a background of the same colour is unfounded and unresearched. It seems more that were simply trying to “make it like the other stuff” without even doing any UX testing.
Humans fundamentally evolved colour eyesight because it aids in perceiving our environment. Grass is green, fire is orange, sky is blue, scary monsters are gray and scaly. When users have ten or more years of visual ‘muscle’ memory behind them, removing colour, let alone shape and form (in the form of object based icons) is disorienting and plain stupid.
No one ever complained that Visual Studio 2010 was too colourful and distracted them from their code, at least not in the way that the developers are complaining about the beta. If anything, it reinforces the structure of the IDE panel and toolbar layout by providing colour, shape and line cues in our peripheral vision.
I could go on, but given the almost universally negative feedback on this issue, I’m not alone in my frustration.
All the features in the world couldn’t get me to use a UI like that, especially when I have a user interface as nice as Visual Studio 2010’s. I had trouble separating the IDE into panels and objects. Which gray rectangle with gray shapes is the solution explorer. Which gray rectangle with gray shapes is the toolbox?