I'm sure several of you have formed opinions on the new look & feel of the Visual Studio 11 Beta, whether you've installed it on your existing OS or have tried it on one of the preview versions of Windows 8 (or perhaps you’ve just seen screenshots on the web). I've been using it now for a couple of weeks – on and off, admittedly – and have mixed feelings about the new monochrome styling. A lot of people have stronger views (which is basically a polite way of saying it’s fairly universally hated, judging from the feedback).
I do like the modern look of the UI, even if it’s not Metro-based… I'm someone who's quite influenced by aesthetics, although not to the extent of form over function. The logic behind the new design is to reduce the use of colour in order to more effectively draw attention to colour when it's used. Colour is now being dedicated to presenting notifications and status updates to the user.
Fair enough, I suppose, although I admit I’m having trouble differentiating the icons on the debugging toolbar, and am constantly having to check the tooltips to work out how to step over a function rather than into it. I suspect it works better at lower resolutions – as it does in the below video.
I tend not to watch “user experience” videos as a rule, preferring to spend my video-watching time on coding technologies or industry strategy. But it was very interesting to see some of the time-saving features in Visual Studio 11.
For instance, I’m thrilled that I can search the properties and methods in the Solution Explorer using Ctrl-; and then navigate using arrow keys through the results, previewing the various documents prior to opening them for editing – very cool. And the ability to peel off new instances of the Solution Explorer for specific classes, attaching document preview pages to them, is just fantastic.
Another useful point of which I’d previously been unaware is the availability of Productivity Power Tools for Visual Studio 2010, which seem to include at least some of the new VS11 functionality. As I’m still likely to be using Visual Studio 2010 alongside VS11 for some time to come, this looks well worth taking for a spin.
