VS/TFS 11 Announcement Crib Notes

Robert MacLean

24 February 2012

The last few hours have been a buzz of excitement for .NET developers as the covers have been lifted for the next releases of TFS, VS & .NET 4.5 – however there is a problem. There is SO much info wrapped in nice marketing & business talk you will spend hours trying to get through it all, so here are the crib notes. Following each note is a number in braces, this is the number of the source so you can go to it for more info if you wish:

.NET 4.5, VS 11 & TFS 11 beta’s will be available on the 29th Feb. [1]
You can use the products in production from beta (technically called a go-live licence) [2]
Visual Studio 11 has had a UI polish, similar layout but less toolbars by default, less colours (icons are monotone) & a touch of Metro like thinking (white space & typography) [2]
Five editions (or SKUs) of Visual Studio will ship: Express, Test Pro, Pro, Premium & Ultimate. Same as we have in 2010. [3]
TFS will have at least two editions, Express (think TFS basic but FREE) and another edition. We may have more than that. [8]
Visual Studio Professional and up will include Lightswitch! [3]
The architecture tool diagrams can now be read in professional & premium versions too (in 2010 it was premium only). Creation still requires ultimate. [4]
IntelliTrace is supported in production (still an ultimate only feature). [4]
Windows Phone 7 tools included with professional and higher editions of Visual Studio 11. [4]
Express will have two versions: Windows (WPF, WinRT, etc..) & Web (ASP.NET, MVC etc…). [5]
There are two themes for Visual Studio: Light (pictured above) & Dark which feels like a Expression Blend style. [6]
Quick launch is a new search feature allows you to search for any command or option in Visual Studio. [6]
Search has been added to most used tool windows, like solution explorer. [6]
ASP.NET MVC 4 has a bunch of evolutionary improvements, nothing to wet your pants on IMHO. [7]
ASP.NET Web API is a big new feature for both MVC & WebForms for building API’s for the web. Think services like WCF but built for the modern web. [9]
Visual Studio 11 is a code name – expect a name change by release. [10]
Workflow hubs in Visual Studio 11 allows you to focus on a task in a single place, rather than have to move around multiple windows. [11]
Preview tabs allow you to sneak a peek at documents without needing to actually open them. [10]
C# 5 (yes, it is version 5 of C# that is shipping with .NET 4.5 – who says this is confusing) has support for async. [10]
New code compare tool & UI that doesn’t suck. [11]
New code review tool support in TFS & Visual Studio. [12]
New mock up design tool that ships with Visual Studio/TFS that allows you to build mock user interfaces in Powerpoint. Think Sketchflow without the code or Balsamiq. [13]
New Visual Studio METRO’d logo [14]:

Want to see some pictures of all of this? http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/presskits/developer/imagegallery.aspx

Sources

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