Visual Studio 2010 – first impressions
In a lot of ways, my employeer tends to be a first-mover when it comes to new versions of software. In that tradition, I decided to take Visual Studio 2010 and the .Net framework 4.0 for a spin.
Executive summary: Do… upgrade… now… at least if you do WPF in LOB applications.
I ended up converting all our projects to 2010 (albeit only one of them to .Net 4.0) – below I’ll outline the improvements that justified that in my case:
Performance – my impression on performance is that it has really paid off that MS decided to postpone launch pending performance problems. It runs a lot better on my system compared to VS2008. My system suffers from poor harddisk performance which lead to many IO-issues crashing 2008 – these issues are all gone (2 days of heavy refactoring without a single crash is a pretty good indicator). I use a lot of XAML – which was a pain in 2008 as simple changes in the editor could take up to a second to perform (a major issue when your typing speed is above 300 key-hits/minute. It is virtually painless now – the intellisense has been vastly improved and the editor feels snappy. RAM usage seems to have gone up – after a day of refactoring, I’m at about 700 mb for a solution with 15 assemblies loaded and ~17.000 lines of code and heavy use of XAML. I have nothing to compare to, as it was unlikely to have VS 2008 run long enough for it to go above 400 mb (roughly required a restart every 3-4 hours).
I upgraded R# within minutes – despite improvements, Visual Studio is still no where near in functionality when it comes to refactoring support. VS 2010 and R# combined makes for effortless typing – free-text search in type-search is a fantastic feature in complex solutions. R# seems a wee bit slower when it comes to context actions – but the jury is still out on that one. R# caused my only crash just after installing – it turns out that performing 8-9 refactorings via key-strokes almost instantaneously does not work (I forgot the actual combination and tried out the 10 I thought might be it…).
.Net 4.0 – lots of good stuff here – new controls (much missed DataGrid, DatePicker and Calendar) that actually look like the other controls (out goes the Frankensteins from WPF Toolkit) – and my absolute winner hands-down: Binding support in InputBindings – such an obvious feature, but finally it is here. Took away about 80% of my code-behinds ontop of ViewModels. And did I mention the new editor? Absolute goodness performance-wise.
Oh – and the icing on the cake: Fantastic multiple display support – I use three screens – and now I can have my solution/properties/errorlists on one screen, debugging on another and have my primary screen dedicated to code… it almost makes my eyes water. (Yes, I know that you could do virtually the same with floating windows in 2008, but for me it was inflexible, irritating and nitty-picky work to have it working – now it has full support for docking in all views).
A few things deduct though – the release of the Ribbon-tooling as a separate package… well, I’ll live. But why in the name of … did they not fix the SelectedDate-Binding bug of the DatePicker? I have yet to dig into the code of the controls, but it seems only the icing was fixed on the controls from the WPF Toolkit CTP.
So, in conclusion – VS 2010 seems all about improving that which was poor in VS 2008 making the platform a much more friction-free and mature workplace. In my book that pays off. I have yet to find a lot of new functionality (may be due to using R# on top), but I seem to be using more of the tooling now that it is less trouble to do so. The new-comers in .Net 4.0 with dynamics and such will have to wait for me to find a use for them – for me the new stuff is mainly corner-case functionality, but then, I’m not really missing a lot as it is.