A large chunk of our customers still use XP so we won’t be upgrading VS any time soon. Still, out of curiosity I spent some free time with the VS11 Beta and below are some bits and pieces I noticed that I (mostly) haven’t read elsewhere.

Bug Fixes

I’m sure there are plenty, but MS doesn’t make the full list public (please join me in trying to fix that). I can say that two minor bugs that bothered me are indeed solved and one isn’t. Also, MS finally solved a major-ish issue I reported that prevented using STL containers on aligned elements. This last fix opens up some serious potential optimizations – I’d finally be able to make our matrices 16-byte aligned and apply SSE to them.

UI enhancements

I agree that the colorless GUI and ALL-CAPS-TITLES do not increase productivity, and I hope the options dialog does become resizable one day, but by and large I don’t understand the heat of this discussion .  Maybe it’s the most heavily discussed aspect of every new version just because it’s the most widely accessible aspect. Maybe it’s just fertile ground for MS-bashers – covering the entire range from ‘why did they change the GUI, I can’t find anything now’ up to ‘they just slapped some new GUI around the same product’.

Here’s a thoughtful little addition to the UI: the Project Properties dialog now includes an ‘All Options’ sub-category, for most property categories (C/C++, Linker, etc.):

I didn’t think of it until after seeing this addition, but it entails some deep usability analysis. It probably seemed like a good UI practice to divide the jungle of compiler/linker switches into digestible-size categories, but in practice I often find myself wasting time looking for a single familiar option within inevitably vague categories.

They might have gotten a bit carried away, though.. :

Here’s another nice addition to the editor context menu:

Well, it will be nice when it actually works, anyway. In the mean time /showincludes does the work for me.

Editor enhancements

There are a ton of those – in syntax coloring, code completion, reference highlighting, code snippets and more, but I use the almighty Visual Assist extensively and the native IDE still has a way to go to catch up with it.

Debugger Enhancements

New debugging scenarios are now supported, and the visibility of different debugger configurations is vastly improved:

I didn’t experiment with any web/GPU debugging myself yet, but these do seem promising.

I do get a fair share of optimized builds debugging, and so had high hopes from the new advertised PDB improvements, that allow watching more variables and stepping into inlined functions in release builds.  So far, I have very little to write home about:

The vast majority of local variables (probably all those which are stored only in registers) are still un-watchable.  The ‘Variable is optimized away’ message is a nice direction, but still appears very sporadically. It doesn’t show in the screenshot, but I had no luck stepping into inlined functions too.

Next time…

The part I care most about are compiler enhancements, and specifically the auto vectorizer. More on that –in the coming post.