#visual studio 11

Microsoft announced the release of the much-anticipated Visual Studio 11 Beta (VS 11) last week. After downloading and installing it today, here are my first impressions. Downloading The download from MSDN is an ISO (DVD image) file. It's almost 1.8 GB in size, and took a few hours to get (especially as I was simultaneously downloading SQL Server 2012 RC as well -- that one itself being 4.4 GB). Next, I unpacked the ISO using 7-Zip, which is available (for free) from download.cnet.com. This way I could run the install directly from the hard disk; the alternative is to burn a DVD and then install Visual Studio 11 from that DVD. Or, if we want to neither unpack nor burn a DVD, 7-Zip also enables us to view the contents of the ISO, and permits running the installer directly from there without unpacking. Installing Installation was quite straightforward. It took about 2 hours on my machine, and requires about 10 GB of space. The first thing to notice was the new splash screen - stylish in blue and gray. While waiting, there's a cool set of 5 dots that repeatedly move across the screen, replacing the familiar green moving bar. With 2 hours to ponder over them, I concluded that each was pulling the one behind it using a rubber-band. This physics is especially noticeable when the 5th one is pulled away.

Once the install is complete, and after a mandatory restart, VS 11 is good to run. Running Visual Studio 11 The first time it's run, it asks for your development environment preferences - C# or VB development, Web development and so on. Along with that, it also offers to copy preferences from the prior VS version - not sure how this overlap works or gets resolved.

Once I got past that, the new Visual Studio 11 home screen came up. For Visual Studio 2010 users, the first difference is the switch in placements of the Open/Create Project and the Getting Started materials. The latter is now on the left, much more prominent. In some ways this highlights the available learning material, and that is a good approach. Graphics on the screens are monochrome presently; I imagine the designers at Microsoft are hard at work creating beautiful full-color icons that'll come with the final release.

Visual Studio 11 comes with the latest .NET 4.5 framework, as well as with MVC 4. Together, the whole set forms a powerful team, and there's a ton of new material to learn -- as well as to enjoy! They contain great features both on the IDE side as well the .NET library side. It is installable side-by-side with Visual Studio 2010, and in fact one of the most interesting features (first time for any VS version, I think) is that a Visual Studio 2010 .NET 4 project can be opened in VS 11 as well -- without breaking it for VS 2010. This sounds like a really good feature for teams that may have some members using VS 2010 and others VS 11, allowing the team to upgrade gradually. Shown below is a screenshot of the default MVC 4 web app, out of the box and without any additional coding at all. It definitely is a very far cry from the VS 2010 MVC 2 or MVC 3 starting points.

Some interesting announcements were made last week during BUILD2011, and here's some of the things I'm most excited about.

Changes in the way products are released

Scott Hanselman comments on his blog:

"It's also worth noting that while there is a bunch of stuff in the next version of Visual Studio, there's an equally compelling amount of stuff being released from the Azure/Web Team on NuGet."

It's great that's now so easy to add new packages to an existing project so easily. The days of searching for dll's, copy and pasting config sections around is over. This accommodates more granular releases for smaller pieces of functionality, and as Scott mentions, levels the playing field with other open source packages. Also Nuget is awesome, and I'll be blogging later on creating your own read-only Nuget repository (useful for Enterprise level distribution of "Common" assemblies and dependencies.

MVC4 and Web Pages 2

Support for Mobile Views (something Scott Hanselman had been working on) are part of MVC4, along with new HTML5 templates and new mobile JQuery templates. Web Pages 2 seems quite interesting - a new lightweight framework for data-driven websites where the View and the Controller live in the same file. This seems to be pushed as part of WebMatrix (Microsoft's lighter version of VS for developing with a number of open source frameworks).

Backwards Compatibility for Projects and Solutions (finally!)

I've always tried the latest version of Visual Studio soon after the developer preview is released, and it's always seemed pretty limiting that you can't just open an older project without having to convert it first. Whilst this limitation can be accepted during the previews and betas (as many organisations would frown upon using these for production code), once the RTM release is out it's often months before everyone on your team has upgraded and the projects and solutions can be converted and checked in. Finally Microsoft has listened! VS11 will have the ability to open and save projects and solutions without the need to convert. :-)

Asyncronous Tasks and the "Await" Keyword

I'd been given a sneak preview of this at the Guathon earlier in the year, as demonstrated by Steve Sanderson. The new await keyword allows .NET to do all the hard work when using long running pieces of code, without having to code event handlers etc. See what I mean with the code below...

private async Task ScrapeHtmlPage(object caller, EventArgs e)  {     WebClient wc = new WebClient();     var result = await wc.DownloadStringTaskAsync("http://www.microsoft.com");     // Do something with the result }

Easy huh? The framework will finish calling the rest of your code without blocking the thread, meaning you can handle more requests, quicker.

Bundling

I've often looked at google's PageSpeed tools and tried to improve the speed of my sites. One trick I've used is an http handler to bundle and minify the css and javascript into 2 compostite files (as this cuts down on HTTP requests). .NET 4.5 gives you this functionality built right into the Routing Engine. For example, to include all of the js files in the scripts directory into one minified file, simply add the following to your HTML source...

<script src="scripts/js"></script>

Similarly, to include all of the css files in the Styles directory...

<link href="styles/css" rel="stylesheet" />

In Summary