First the good news – the internals of Visual Studio haven’t been futzed with. Not much as far as I can see anyway – there’s no new WPF Editor implementation or anything like that, thank goodness. The other good news is a new image editor that allows (gasp) transparency or alpha channel editing. If you’ve ever had the misfortune to use the old Visual Studio image editor, you’ll raise a cheer (as did the audience at BUILD when this was announced, apparently).
The other two major areas that I can see from a quick inspection are, first, extra tools to help parallel processing development and debugging. Secondly, improved C++ support particularly for IntelliSense and C++ 11.
Now, the C++ thing is odd, because for years Microsoft has neglected C++, concentrating on managed .NET languages like C#, VB and lately F#. So why C++? It must be for performance reasons. The only two places where performance matters that I can think of are mobile and games. For mobiles, the reason is battery life. Faster doesn’t mean zippier swipes (though it does help of course) – but it does mean less cycles and so better battery life.
For games, C++ now supports passively parallel systems for GPUs. And another consideration might be that processor speeds on desktops have maxed out at around 3GHz for the last few years and it doesn’t seem to be increasing any time soon.
And the bad news? There isn’t any as far as I can see. Visual Studio keeps getting bigger with more features and technologies being supported. From my initial kicking of the tyres it’s still the same absolutely solid industrial strength IDE: I still think it’s the only IDE that’s in this category.
At last - a decent image Editor!
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