Any opinions on VS 2013 yet?

[Herman]

Looking to see if the new features are working as expected, if it's stable enough, and if the awesome intellisense and debugger improvements are worth an upgrade from 2012. Are those nice HUD features that show source control recent changes, authors, issues, and references working for all the languages?

Those are the ones:

 

[jmcilhinney]

I've been using VS 2013 for a while now and I've only had two issues with it.

1. The first time I used the RC, the NuGet dialogue disappeared when I selected a package. I couldn't reproduce the issue in the RC, the following LCTP or the RTM.

2. I installed the RTM over the top of an LCTP over the top of the RC on my desktop system and my pinned icon has no jump list. I installed the RTM fresh on both my laptops and neither displays this issue.

Other than that, VS 2013 has worked perfectly. Of those that I've seen, the new features work well. and I think that the extra little bit of colour is an improvement too. I am quite used to the flat look but VS 2012 as a little bit drab and the purely monochrome icons are not always easy to distinguish.

Is it worth the price of an upgrade? I get it as part of an MSDN subscription so I don't pay for it specifically. I don't even know how much an upgrade is so I'm not really qualified to comment.

 

[Herman]

I get it through my employer, who is a MS partner, so price is not really an issue. We are currently working with 2010 at work (I have 2012 express here, but will upgrade to 2013 premium when they do at the office), but our license renewal is coming up and my employer was asking if there were any serious issues (the kinds we saw in the first release of 2012, which postponed our previous upgrade...). Are you aware if the new HUD supports SVN for tracking changes? The new memory profiler also was a huge point of interest.

 

[JuggaloBrotha]

I'm still using VS2010 because last I looked (a couple years ago) there wasn't a 2010 theme for VS2012 yet.. I have difficulty with the flat look, I need to be able to distinguish the icons and be able to see the dividers, since .Net 4.5 doesn't bring anything new to the table that I can use in my projects, I have no need to move beyond VS2010 still. I haven't used or seen VS2013 yet so I can't comment, but I plan to on a VM sometime in the next couple of months, just to see what all is in it.. I hope the default flat look is gone and the lively 2010 theme is back.

 

[jmcilhinney]

I'm still using VS2010 because last I looked (a couple years ago) there wasn't a 2010 theme for VS2012 yet.. I have difficulty with the flat look, I need to be able to distinguish the icons and be able to see the dividers, since .Net 4.5 doesn't bring anything new to the table that I can use in my projects, I have no need to move beyond VS2010 still. I haven't used or seen VS2013 yet so I can't comment, but I plan to on a VM sometime in the next couple of months, just to see what all is in it.. I hope the default flat look is gone and the lively 2010 theme is back.

That flat look is here to stay so you had better get used to it. It was a bit of a shock at first but I got used to it in VS 2012 soon enough, especially when they added a new Blue theme to the original Dark and Light. It introduced VS 2010-like colours at least, if not so much the look and feel. VS 2013 does add a dash more colour and many of the icons are more distinct now. I can understand that it's not everyone's cup of tea but I'm quite happy with it visually.

 

[jmcilhinney]

I get it through my employer, who is a MS partner, so price is not really an issue. We are currently working with 2010 at work (I have 2012 express here, but will upgrade to 2013 premium when they do at the office), but our license renewal is coming up and my employer was asking if there were any serious issues (the kinds we saw in the first release of 2012, which postponed our previous upgrade...). Are you aware if the new HUD supports SVN for tracking changes? The new memory profiler also was a huge point of interest.

I have to admit that I haven't put it through its paces fully yet as I've been concentrating on a new WP8 app but I've not seen an issue at all with the RTM. With regards to source control support, we use SVN at work but haven't started using VS 2013 there yet so I couldn't say. I use TFS Express at home. One thing that I did note was that VS 2013 explicitly asked if I wanted to use TFS or Git when I fired up the RTM for the first time, so inbuilt support may be limited to those two providers. You may have to wait for your plug-in provider (AnkhSVN, etc) to add that support.

 

[Herman]

I installed 2013 Express last night, and yeah the Blue theme is just fine, looks and feel similar enough to 2010 not to be a pain in the ass... Unfortunately still no native support for SVN, AnkhSVN and VisualSVN both work, but neither works with the new HUD. I wonder why they keep ignoring the most popular version control system out there, why are they pushing Git over SVN? No major problems yet, but it did close unexpectedly (no exception or anything logged) once when adding a reference (of all things that could fail...). Fortunately the auto-save feature seems to have been improved, as when I recovered I had lost no data (maybe one or two lines of code...).

 

[jmcilhinney]

I wonder why they keep ignoring the most popular version control system out there, why are they pushing Git over SVN?

I think that it's because Microsoft use Git themselves on Codeplex.

 

[Herman]

Yeah well shunning the by large most popular production system to promote a maybe better, but much less popular (for now anyways) first-party solution is anti-competitive and downright insulting in my opinion... SVN should be de-facto integrated in any IDE that supports version control for any language...

 

[JuggaloBrotha]

That flat look is here to stay so you had better get used to it. It was a bit of a shock at first but I got used to it in VS 2012 soon enough, especially when they added a new Blue theme to the original Dark and Light. It introduced VS 2010-like colours at least, if not so much the look and feel. VS 2013 does add a dash more colour and many of the icons are more distinct now. I can understand that it's not everyone's cup of tea but I'm quite happy with it visually.

That's good to know, I'll have to give 2013 a try sometime here.
I'm also realizing that I still have most of my apps in VS2008 with everything else being in 2010... time to give 2013 a try and see about migrating all of them to that IDE.
I do wish they'd stop making these Win3.1 flat-style themes for everything (Win8, Office '13, VS '13), I thought software was supposed to look better over time & not go retro

 

[jmcilhinney]

I'm also realizing that I still have most of my apps in VS2008 with everything else being in 2010... time to give 2013 a try and see about migrating all of them to that IDE.

They introduced project round-tripping in VS 2012. 2012 can open 2010 solutions without upgrading them, allowing them still be opened in 2010. 2013 can round-trip both 2010 and 2012 solutions. Anything created in 2008 or earlier will still need to be upgraded.

I do wish they'd stop making these Win3.1 flat-style themes for everything (Win8, Office '13, VS '13), I thought software was supposed to look better over time & not go retro

One of the complaints about Windows 8 is that it appears to be two disparate OSes bolted together. Windows 8.1 has gone some way to addressing that by making the Modern UI feel a bit closer to the desktop but the flat look to Microsoft software these days is attacking the problem from the other end, i.e. making desktop software look more like a Modern UI app.

By the way, have you guys tried Windows 8.1 yet? I had no particular issues with Windows 8 but even I think that it's an improvement. The only complaint that they haven't addressed is the lack of the Start Menu, which they simply won't. It's really not an issue though because the improved Start screen and All Apps screen can do all anyone really needs.

Of course, there'll be those who bitch and moan but there always are. I read a blog post the other day talking about how there's been such an uproar over the changes Microsoft have made to Windows and yet so many hailed the iOS and Android interfaces as such great achievements. I know that Windows was still being run on non-touch-enabled PCs, so it's slightly different, but way too much was made of the changes. I mean, how much of an uproar was there that people needed to perform one click to get to the desktop. ONE CLICK! Anyway, Windows 8.1 removes that requirement so at least those folks will stop moaning.

 

[JohnH]

Thread split, for the Metro/start menu GUI discussion, go here: http://www.vbdotnetforums.com/programmer-chat/59001-w8-metro-start-menu-gui-discussion.html