VS2010 beta came out a few hours ago, installing it took way too long (over an hour, VS2008 takes less than 10 min for me) and it seems some addins don't install or just don't work, but other than that everything else seems to work great:
- TestDriven.NET provides an VS2010 option and it will appear in Addins, but the Menu Items will not appear anywhere. Just use keyboard shortcuts and everything still works :) .. at least it worked for a short while (see below). Hopefully Jamie Cansdale fixes this soon because without TestDriven.NET I can't really use VS2010 right now. MS provides its own unit testing framework, which is implemented into VS2010 and even available in the Pro edition now (was only in more advanced versions before), but I still don't like it. It does not output anything to the console except exceptions; it is not possible to just start some Ad-Hoc unit test and for all my functional tests it is also useless. For just "normal" unit test projects VS test integration is quite ok, but I would suggest trying out NUnit or xUnit together with TestDriven.NET, which is just more flexible, easier to use and improves productivity IMO.
- Completely unable to install any CodeRush version (neither 2, 3, 9.1, Xpress), so I'm also unable to use my CR_Commenter :( hopefully DevExpress provides a version soon, they always were very quick with early VS2005 and VS2008 support!
- Most other addins I tried also did not install or just do not appear anywhere (only in VS2008)
- One of my own addins I wrote 2 years ago for VS2008 also does not appear, it probably needs to be configured to appear in the VisualStudio/10 reg key!
Most annoying:
- Even though Rico Mariani (the .NET performance god) is helping out the VS team to give VS2010 better performance, it currently lags all over the place. I had 10 second delays in Options, Add References and Renaming dialogs already. Seems to be always an issue with opening up stuff for the first time. After a while everything seems to be fast, but I would not say this is faster than VS2008 yet.
- Only tried this at my home PC till now, but everytime I close VS2010 I cannot open it up again until I restart (or at least log off/log on) again, which is REALLY annoying. I will just keep VS2010 open now all the time and hope it never crashes ^^ The start splash-screen is also messed up and completely black. Maybe this is only on my home PC because I tried to install so many addins, will try this tomorrow at work too.
Update 2009-05-18: I just found out what was causing this. Some addins tried to load, but failed for some reasons and then the addin loading code locks up or whatever and VS never finishes starting up (the process devenv.exe is still there, but you just don't see any IDE window, they are never created). It seems to be related to the TestDriven.NET-2.21.2448 version, I also tried TestDriven.NET-2.20.2438 - same problem :( (Jamie Cansdale, the creator of TestDriven.NET was also recently blogging about this). Then I used , which also already has VS2010 support and that seems to work fine (no menus, but keyboard shortcuts work fine). I posted more details on Jamie's blog!
Every project I have opened, had to be converted to the new VS 10 format, which is kinda stupid because it seems nothing has changed. All the code works just fine and no changes were required. I will start using some .NET 4.0 features and test out stuff in the next days, especially using Parallel Programming and MEF (Managed Extensibility Framework). Probably will play around with the C# 4.0 dynamic keyword a bit also, but can't think of anything yet where I would really need it. Maybe to talk easier to IronPython or my own DLR language ..
Cool features:
- Start page is pretty good, easily customizable, but I will probably never see it as I setup my VS to always load the last solution (like my Firefox ^^)
- It is easy to drag tabs around and move them to different screens. Finally I can use some multi-monitoring.
- Old exported VS2008 settings also work just fine in VS2010, even coloring :) For some strange reason the background color is always white when I start VS2010 for the first time, then after going to options and closing it, it will be the correct color (black for me).
- Overall the IDE is very nice and fits perfectly into my color theme. Its also a lot easier to see whats going on, which tab is selected and positioning tool windows all over the place is better than ever before.
Go check out VS2010 yourself, available on MSDN right now and on MS site on Wednesday for everyone else.
