I’m using Visual Studio 2008 more and more each week. It’s installed side by side with VS 2005 on my primary laptop and I’m going to start using it for my WPF presentations. Until recently all my presentation have been on either VS 2005 or on VS 2008 running in a virtual machine.
There is a lot to like in the new IDE. Yes, there are a few annoyances too. The XAML editor window no longer stubs in the end tag when entering an element. It also doesn’t enter the two quote marks when adding an attribute to an element. Both these omissions drive me crazy. The good news, from Mark Boulter on the Cider team, is that these issues will be fixed before the next interim release.
Design Specs
I found this link today. It is a Microsoft site that list some of the design specs for the Orcas project. BTW, all the docs are in the new high fidelity XPS format.
Quote from Visual Studio Settings Migration document
Many features in Visual Studio expose “control points” which allow some aspect of that feature to be customized by the user via some UI. A typical example of this is the options exposed in Tools Options (e.g. Fonts and Colors, Keyboard mappings, editor preferences and much more). Furthermore, aspects of the user interface can be customized, such as toolbars, window layouts, etc. These settings are persisted across sessions so that the next time the user launches their IDE, the “state” of their IDE is restored. This experience is critical to developer’s productivity, since it affects almost every aspect of their interaction with the IDE. Visual Studio also ships with a set of canned Settings (called “Profiles”) which customize the IDE out of the box to suit specific developer personas. Over time users change these default settings as part of their daily use of the IDE.
Since Orcas is intended to be a “zero impact” upgrade experience from Whidbey, it is important that we provide a mechanism by which the user’s current Whidbey settings can be applied to their Orcas IDE, thereby providing a familiar environment in which to continue their work.
