The Book of Ashes

Visual Studio 11 1:33PM

So I switched over the using the Visual Studio 11 beta when it came out. Its been a couple of weeks now so getting used to the basics and the new greyscale theme. There's already a lot of opinion about this and whether its good or bad or what can be improved. I think the general point is that VS was too busy/cluttered and that simplifying the surroundings so you can concentrate on the code is a good thing and in general using it is a good experience, there is less distraction from the surroundings. Whether they could have done it better or not is another question I'll leave for now. I think the biggest point here is change management and a either a lead up to this change (with discussions) or simply leaving the old skin as a backup you could revert to would have been useful.

Anyway what I wanted to bring up was small improvements that I'd like to see...

1) For the CTRL+F search box which is now an in-window dialog box. Its nice (and a little buggy in the beta, but we'll assume that will be fixed) but could do with a count of matches on the dialog like the Chrome browser does (see top part of image below).



Its little bits of information that speed things up.

2) For VS2010 there was an extension (Productivity Power Tools?) that added edits, breakpoints, bookmarks, errors, warnings etc as colour overlays on the scrollbar. At first I thought this was just noise (it looks a little messy) but after loosing it in VS11 I realise how much I use it. For example, adding CSS, JS and HTML in a razor template. I jump between 3 areas on the page. With green highlights on the scrollbar showing me edits, I can see those three areas and scroll straight to them, need to fix the JS bit I just wrote, scroll to the second green blog, no searching or hunting for code changes, easy to see at a glance. Also highlights breakpoints and bookmarks, good for marking important parts of code to flick between. In my opinion this should be built in.

3) Searching within a page should allow you to search say string literals (say you're printing an '&' in the text and its the only one, try searching a c# page for '&' and you'll get lots of results when you really only want to search text. Maybe this exists already and I just don't know about it?

4) Add debugging line numbers for in-line object initiation. E.g.


var person = new Person {
FirstName = "Ashley",
LastName = "Bryant",
MiddleName = "Stephen",
... etc ...
};

If theres an error in this, it will break with the first line number and not tell you which parameter/line number had the problem. Can be real frustrating if on a live system and you can't tell which bit is bad. I like this syntax but it puts you off using it if you can't get good debug info.

5) It looks like they have combined the CTRL+SHIFT+F (search all files) with the CTRL+F (search current file). Its really annoying, now I search all files and have to change the current scope to "Solution", then when I go to search within a document it searches all documents instead of that one and goes REALLY slowly and sometime jumps out of that file. Now every time I change I have to keep changing the scope. Why can't CTRL+SHIFT+F always default to "Solution" and CTRL+F to "Current document" or at least store the last used separately for the two.

6) Had some more ideas but ran out of time to write them up.