Okay, I know I haven’t written to this blog in quite a while, partly due to the fact that I have a Russian-language blog that I’ve been posting to and, as you can imagine, posting to two blogs at the same time is not practical because translation is too ‘costly’ for the brain to do all the time. Even for someone bilingual.

Probably the most important event recently has been the launch of…

Yep, that’s right, I took part in the VS2010 launch – as a visitor of course, seeing how my company isn’t a Microsoft partner, nor is it big enough to be a significant user of the VS/TFS stack. Anyways, I won’t recount the launch and after-party – needless to say, Microsoft organized everything brilliantly, though the variety of talks in St. Pete wasn’t big enough to cover all the new features of VS.

That said, here’s my list of likes and dislikes for the new version of VS.

Likes:

  • Migration worked smoothly and effortlessly. Seriously, I managed to convert most of my projects from VS’08 to 2010, and everything worked without a hitch.

  • The Extensions Manager is a really good idea for creating a ‘marketplace’ of components that developers may need. I found many small but useful things in there.

  • F# finally made it into Visual Studio. Now, it hasn’t got perfect support in terms of IntelliSense, documentation and helpers, and there’s no ReSharper for it, but the fact that it is there already means a lot.

  • IntelliTrace, the historical debugger, is probably the killer feature of this release of Visual Studio.

  • Generation of sequence diagrams from code is really cool. I haven’t checked the validity of what’s generated, though.

  • Architecture explorer is very useful. I can’t see myself using it often, but when needed, I’m sure it can save the day for some people.

  • ReSharper 5 is available for it. Just thought I’d mention it because it’s important. I think many people would hold off using VS2010 if R#5 wasn’t simultaneously available.

Dislikes:

  • Team Explorer is installed in VS by default, and the VCS provider is set to TFS. Since a huge portion of end users won’t be using TFS, like, ever, I thought it’s a bit strange.

  • UML support really isn’t finished – there’s no roundtrip engineering, for example. Sure, it’s all fixable (somewhat) via T4 templates and some hackery but seriously, this kind of stuff should come out of the box.

  • IntelliTrace is only available with the most expensive edition of VS. This makes economic sense, but I think given this is one of the best features of the new VS, it’s a bit unfair to make it so inaccessible.

  • Still no out-of-the-box support for Subversion, Git and Mercurial. Come on people! The majority of people are going to need one of those. Yeah, there’s an extension manager, but why not pre-package it like other IDEs do?

  • There’s no built-in SDKs for mobile development, Azure or Visual Studio itself. Given that any edition of VS2010 weighs 7Gb, I think those SDKs would not affect the size much, but could save me a bit of trouble.

Overall, I’d say that while I’m generally happy with the new release, there isn’t a lot that VS2010 brings to the table, and there’s certainly nothing revolutionary (not even IntelliTrace) that would make you go wow in any sort of way. There’s a lot of stuff for TFS users, sure, but as someone who uses Mercurial, FogBugz and similar, I won’t be able to appreciate all the new TFS stuff anytime soon.