Visual Studio 11--Positive User Interface Changes coming in RC

It seems that Microsoft has listened to much of the feedback (mostly negative) received on the Visual Studio 11 Beta and is ACTUALLY doing something about it for the upcoming RC release!

You can read more about the User Interface changes coming to Visual Studio 11 RC here:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudio/archive/2012/05/08/visual-studio-11-user-interface-updates-coming-in-rc.aspx

Visual Studio 11/2012 RC--Unable to create Unit Tests

If you have recently started using Visual Studio 11 Beta for your development and you regularly work with Unit Tests, you might have noticed that there is a major glaring hole in the newest release of the IDE.  Namely, Visual Studio 11 no longer allows you to create Unit Tests from your existing code base!!!  I am guessing that the "new philosophy" in Visual Studio 11 is that if you "strictly" follow Test-Driven Development you will always create your Unit Tests first.

Well, Microsoft, that simply is not true.  I regularly used to create Unit Tests from my existing code base using Visual Studio 2010 and the most appealing aspect of it was that Visual Studio 2010 used to shell out my entire Unit Test for me with my selected methods, thus saving me a tremendous amount of time.  So if I had created a Class Diagram in my Visual Studio project to generate my "empty shell" of a Class, I could easily create my Unit Tests from my code base and then follow TDD practices.

However, that ability is now completely gone from the Visual Studio 11 IDE.  Even in the Visual Studio 2012 RC, they have not added this functionality back into the IDE.

Check out the screenshots below from Visual Studio 11 vs. Visual Studio 2010:

Do you miss this functionality from Visual Studio 2012 as I do?  

If so, please provide feedback to Microsoft and let them know that you want it back!!

http://visualstudio.uservoice.com/forums/121579-visual-studio/suggestions/2748862-add-create-unit-tests-menu-option-back-

Exciting SharePoint Features coming to Visual Studio 11

If you are a SharePoint Developer or Architect, you probably are well aware of the numerous limitations in developing applications for SharePoint:

1. Functionality such as client-based InfoPath Forms cannot be easily Unit Tested or Tested
2. Web Tests for SharePoint are not very reliable
3. Unit Testing for SharePoint requires separately downloading and installing Pex and Moles
4. Web Part development does not lend itself well to creating and developing Unit Tests
5. Load Testing for SharePoint cannot be done through the Load testing tools available in Visual Studio 2010.  Even community developed tools still expect Visual Studio 2008 SP1 to perform load testing on the environment.

Fortunately, the Visual Studio 11 roadmap has plans to address (at least some of) these issues. 

"In Visual Studio 11 we are expanding our support for teams working with SharePoint with features like performance profiling, unit testing, and IntelliTrace support. In the first Ultimate Feature Pack after Visual Studio 11 we’ll make it easy to test your site for high volume by introducing SharePoint load testing. We will also make it easier to do SharePoint unit testing by providing Behaviors support for SharePoint API’s. This is a great win for teams developing SharePoint solutions."  http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jasonz/archive/2012/03/27/visual-studio-ultimate-roadmap.aspx

Based on the description provided in the roadmap, Pex and Moles will soon be integrated directly into the Unit Testing framework for Visual Studio 11 and SharePoint Load Testing will finally be supported in the latest version of the IDE!!

I am certainly looking forward to the release of this feature pack to make my SharePoint development tasks easier.

UI Prototyping with Visual Studio 11 and PowerPoint

If you have ever had to do User Interface prototyping, prior to a few years ago, you were probably limited to using Microsoft Visio.  Unfortunately, Microsoft Visio does not ship with a very rich set of User Interface shapes/templates, so most User Interface prototyping done with Visio was primitive at best.

More recently, Microsoft released Sketchflow which shipped with the Expression Studio Ultimate suite.  This tool is much more sophisticated and has a far richer set of user controls for designing User Interfaces.  The prototypes can also be designed using Silverlight or WPF, so that the final designs can then be used directly in actual Silverlight or WPF projects.  Sketchflow even allows customers to comment on User Interface changes and allows those changes to be incorporated back into the original prototype.  Of course, the limiting factors with using this tool are that it ONLY ships with the Ultimate version of Expression Studio and it also requires a learning curve for adopting this new tool. 

Now enter Visual Studio 11 with PowerPoint Storyboarding.  PowerPoint is familiar to nearly every user who regularly uses Microsoft Office.  Unlike working with Sketchflow, which requires a separate reader application, every user's workstation will have a copy of Microsoft Office on their system thus making sharing these UI prototypes a no-brainer.  In addition, the user interface closely resembles the drag and drop interface found in Microsoft Visio, so the learning curve is negligible.

As you can see from the screenshot above, PowerPoint Storyboarding has simply added a new tab called Storyboarding to my installation of PowerPoint 2010.  In addition, the list of shapes for composing a User Interface are quite vast.  The controls vary from including a number of backgrounds ranging from Visual Studio to SharePoint to even Metro applications.  The controls for prototyping actual interfaces includes a large number of common UI Controls which can be used in Web or client-server applications as well as Windows-specific controls.  There are also controls for Windows Phone and Metro applications.

Overall, this new feature is a welcome addition to the Visual Studio suite.  For many years, developers have been frustrated with the poor tooling for prototyping User Interfaces.  The introduction of Sketchflow and its limited licensing model continued to make this option unavailable to many development teams and organizations.  However, the introduction of PowerPoint Storyboarding should make the adoption of fast and easy UI prototyping widespread across .Net development teams.

You can read more about PowerPoint Storyboarding here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh409276(v=vs.110).aspx

In addition, if you search Visual Studio Gallery (http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com) for "storyboard", you can find numerous Visual Studio extensions released by Microsoft and other vendors to support Visual Studio 11/2012 Storyboarding.


 

Visual Studio 11--Changing familiar Visual Studio toolbar icons

I was working in Visual Studio 11 today and I was looking for the familiar toolbar icons to comment out a block of code.  I looked in my standard toolbar and could not find them!!

Can you tell what these toolbar icons are supposed to do??  I definitely had no idea what they were.  So, I hovered over these icons to find out why they were there.

If I had never hovered over this icon to get the tooltip, I never EVER would have figured out what these icons are supposed to do.

I am so used to seeing the standard commenting/uncommenting icons in nearly every single IDE that I have used (at least all of the Microsoft IDEs) that I have never had to think twice about clicking on it in the toolbar.

I am not quite sure why Microsoft has decided to change this very commonly used toolbar icon to an icon which seems not to convey anything about its intent or function!

Is this icon change perhaps another "improvement" to help us to adapt to using the IDE on Windows 8??  Who really knows....  I guess we will just wait and see how Microsoft incorporates current user feedback into the next beta release of Visual Studio 11!

UPDATE:  They have made some slight changes to the Comment/Uncomment icons in the RTM release.  The new icons are shown below:

Interesting use of color in Visual Studio 11

For those of you who have not yet installed Visual Studio 11, Microsoft has decided to remove many of the colors formerly in prior versions of the IDE such as Visual Studio 2010.  Instead, most of the color scheme is either a shade of gray or black.

However, Microsoft still continues to use color in selective places--particularly in the menus.  When you see these items in the menu compared to all of the other menu items, your eyes are immediately drawn to those icons when compared to every other menu item.

It is interesting to note that they continue to use color for what Microsoft deems to be important for menu item recognition, but otherwise removes color entirely from Solution Explorer:

They definitely feel that color has its uses, but just not for viewing files in Solution Explorer???

Visual Studio 11 vs. Expression Blend 4

I have seen several comments regarding the similarities between Visual Studio 11 and Expression Blend 4. 

Personally, I have spent very little time inside of Expression Blend since Microsoft released Silverlight support for Visual Studio.

In any case, I decided to open up Expression Blend 4 for myself to see what differences were present (if any).

The first thing I noticed upon opening a new project was that Expression Blend 4 (while similar) does not look THE SAME as Visual Studio 11.

While Expression Blend 4 is not nearly as colorful as Visual Studio 2010 or any of the other Expression Studio 4 products, it still applies selective use of color. 

Below is a screenshot from Expression Web 4:

Notice that though the IDE uses black and white, several elements continue to use color throughout the User Interface.

Below are some screenshots from Expression Blend:

So as you can see from the screenshots, Expression Blend is far more extreme in removing the use of color, but it continues to intersperse color throughout the IDE.

Some of the notable points where it continues to use color are the following:

1. New project icons continue to use color
2. The content pane and the icons surrounding the content pane continue to use color
3. The toolbox items also continue to use color
4. Some of the tool panes also continue to intersperse color through the use of various icons

Overall, though both Expression Web and Expression Blend cannot be deemed as "pretty IDEs", they certainly can be considered functional and usable.  Working with them seems reasonably comfortable and natural, so Ido not feel like I am straining my eyes just to distinguish content.

Of course, as you can tell, this is a very different tack than what was used with Visual Studio 11.  Instead, of using some color well placed throughout the IDE, they have followed a much more extreme approach of removing nearly all of the color in the IDE!  (http://samirvaidya.blogspot.com/2012/03/visual-studio-11-draining-all-of-colors.html)

Even the new project and item templates no longer have color in Visual Studio 11!!

So, if Microsoft chooses to follow the path that they followed with the Expression Studio suite, I would be OK with that, but the current state of the IDE just seems far, far too extreme to me.

Identity and Access Tool for Visual Studio 11

Microsoft is finally making it easier to support Claims-based identity in all of the applications that developers are creating in Visual Studio 11.  They have recently published an extension for Visual Studio 11 to the Visual Studio 11 Gallery that supports various supports of Web Applications including ASP.Net MVC and WCF Services:

http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/e21bf653-dfe1-4d81-b3d3-795cb104066e?SRC=Home

Too bad it only supports these features for .Net 4.5....

Visual Studio 11 Solution Compatibility

If you have started using the Visual Studio 11 Beta, you may not know this, but Microsoft has finally decided not to change the solution and project compatibility of Visual Studio 11 files!!

So what does this mean?

Well, it means that you can now develop using Visual Studio 11 Beta and if you decide that you do not like it after all, you can seamlessly revert to using Visual Studio 2010 to edit the solution and project!  Yup, absolutely no conversion required!!

From a business perspective, however, the best part of this change is that it allows developers to easily interact with a solution even while working on different versions of the IDE.  If you have developers that wish to use Visual Studio 11 to develop certain features and functionality or wish to use some of the new project templates or debugging features, they can continue to use Visual Studio 11, while developers who want to continue using Visual Studio 2010 or are unable to upgrade (such as overseas developers) can all collaborate on the same solution and project files with no perceptible difference.

What an amazing concept!  Development teams no longer have to scramble to get each and every developer on the same version of the IDE!  Each individual (or development group) can migrate to the new version of the IDE at their own pace or comfort level.

NOTE:Compatibility between solutions and project files will only be maintained if the development team is on Visual Studio 2010 SP1.  Visual Studio RTM will still require a conversion.

Now, if Microsoft can just do the same thing with supporting older versions of Visual Studio Extensions....

Visual Studio 11-Draining all of the colors out of the IDE

If you have not yet installed the Visual Studio 11 Beta, you probably have not seen the drastic change they have made to the IDE.  In the Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview, Visual Studio 11 closely resembled the Visual Studio 2010 IDE with many of the same color schemes and the vivid, bright colors we have come to expect with Windows 7 and the Aero interface.

However, Microsoft has decided to take a completely different approach with Visual Studio 11 Beta.  Instead, of refreshing and updating the color scheme to reflect a new Visual Studio 11 IDE, all of the colors have been "drained out" of the interface.  Instead, one is left with an IDE that is a mixture of shades of grays and black in a manner very similar to looking at a black and white TV.

Below is a screenshot of the Visual Studio 11 Interface using the Light Theme:

Here is the screenshot of the Visual Studio 11 Interface using the Dark Theme:

Even though the Dark Theme is slightly easier to view than the Light Theme, they are both nothing like what we have come to expect from prior releases of Windows and the Visual Studio IDE.  Whereas Microsoft Windows and Visual Studio seemed to be emulating the look and feel of Mac OS X in earlier releases, this version looks like they are trying to copy the "good old days" of black and white televisions or the old green screen monitors of long ago!!

It seems that all the project icons when creating a New Project are pretty much the same shade of  gray as well:

Personally, working with icons that are all of the same color regardless of the file type, does not make it as easy to distinguish content as in earlier releases of the IDE.  Even though all of the icon images differ based on the file type, it is just not the same.

Thankfully, Microsoft did not take away our syntax highlighting when we open up a code file!

Microsoft seems to believe that this is a positive change and an overall improvement in terms of developer productivity:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudio/archive/2012/02/23/introducing-the-new-developer-experience.aspx

I don't believe the color scheme in Visual Studio 2010 ever impacted my productivity in any sense whatsoever (at least not in a manner noticeable to me).  When I look at the Visual Studio 2010 User Interface (as shown below) and compare it side by side with the Visual Studio 11 User Interface, I seem to automatically find it much easier to look at.  I can easily distinguish my folders from my standard files by the use of color.  Since the folder icons look like the folder icons I am used to seeing all the time in Windows Explorer, it makes it that much easier.  With either the Light or Dark Themes, it feels like I have to closely examine my Solution Explorer window to figure out what I need to open.


It just does not seem natural, especially considering that this is the only product that is following this path.  If you look at the new SQL Server Management Studio that ships with SQL Server 2012 (http://samirvaidya.blogspot.com/2012/03/sql-server-2012-management-studio-first.html), you can see that they have continued to follow the Visual Studio 2010 look and feel.

Interestingly enough, Microsoft still feels that color is important in regards to fast and easy recognition (particularly menu items) in Visual Studio 11:  http://samirvaidya.blogspot.com/2012/04/interesting-use-of-color-in-visual.html
 
Even Expression Blend and Expression Web do not follow the removal of color design associated with this most recent release of Visual Studio: (http://samirvaidya.blogspot.com/2012/03/visual-studio-11-vs-expression-blend-4.html)

We already know that SharePoint 2010 and Office 2010 are rich with color, so why single out Visual Studio???  

 


What do you think?  Did Microsoft make the right decision with this "no color scheme" approach?  Did they move forward or did they take 2 steps backward in designing the UI for the Visual Studio 11 IDE?


UPDATE: The RC release has some very minor improvements to the color scheme:
http://samirvaidya.blogspot.com/2012/06/visual-studio-2012-rc-first-look.html


If you have any comments or feedback for Microsoft, you can provide them on their Visual Studio User Voice site:

http://visualstudio.uservoice.com/forums/121579-visual-studio

These feedback items are directly related to the color scheme and theming of Visual Studio 2012 RC:

http://visualstudio.uservoice.com/forums/121579-visual-studio/suggestions/2623017-add-some-color-to-visual-studio-11

https://visualstudio.uservoice.com/forums/121579-visual-studio/suggestions/2819619-leave-vs-2010-theme-and-the-theme-editor-extensio