Answered What am I not seeing here?

[ALX]

I've been happy with VS2008. I thought that I was going to fall behind somehow if I didn't keep up to date software, so I recently downloaded VS2010 Express. I haven't been real impressed so far. It has dumped on me several times and each time I lose code. It's distracting to me the way it highlights all related keywords in the block when the cursor just happens to be near one of them. (I'm hoping this is a feature that I can turn off.) I like Intellisense and all, even when it gets in the way, but I think MS has taken it to new extremes. I can barely keep track of what I'm typing for all the help it wants to give me. Before I dump it and go back to VS2008, I thought I'd ask you guys with the inside scoop what is really being offered in VS2010 as compared to VS2008. If it's substantial, I'll tough it out and grow to love VS2010...
Thanx...

 

[jmcilhinney]

Personally, I like VS 2010 more than VS 2008 and would find it difficult to go back full time. There are annoyances, but then there are annoyances with all software. I have colleagues who have had the occasional crash but I haven't really had an issue. SP1 is just around the corner too, so performance and stability should improve then. There are improvements in both VB 2010 and .NET 4.0, as well as in VS 2010. I'd suggest that you stick it out at least until SP1 has been out for a little while. If you still don't like it, you can always go back then. You won't fall behind, or at least not for a while anyway. Most of what we use every day is available in VS 2008/.NET 3.5. The one must-have I would suggest is if you're creating WPF applications. WPF 4.0 is a significant improvement so you should definitely upgrade in that case.

 

[JohnH]

It's distracting to me the way it highlights all related keywords in the block when the cursor just happens to be near one of them. (I'm hoping this is a feature that I can turn off.)

In my opinion the reference highlighting was a good improvement to VB 2010, but there is a setting:
Options > Text Editor > Basic > VB Specific > Enable highlighting of references and keywords.
How to: Use Reference Highlighting

A little warning, I'm using VB Express 2010 SP1 and it crashes if I turn off that setting when I have a code file open, it works though if I change the setting with empty IDE.

 

[spivonious]

We recently moved up to 2010 at work. Yes there is the occasional crash, but overall I like it more than 2008. It seems faster, has a more modern look, and something is comforting about the fact that large parts of it were made with WPF. It's always nice to see MS doing some "dogfooding".