Delta Engine Blog

AI, Robotics, multiplatform game development and Strict programming language

Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2

Today Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 came out on MSDN. A public version (of Express I guess) will come out on Wednesday, check Microsofts website for that or go to the Visual Studio 2010 site.

I just tried to open a VS2008 solution with about 20 projects and it worked right out of the box. The loadup seems to be a little bit slow, but everything after that was snappy so far. Will report tomorrow more details. For now I like it :)

Update 2009-10-20: After we worked we worked today with Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 exclusively we were pretty happy at the office with it. Most plugins like TestDriven, AnkhSvn, VisualSvn, etc. worked fine, but there is still no support for CodeRush in VS2010. And since everyone in our team is using my CR_Commenter a lot plus the refactorings and helpers of CodeRush and Refactor, you really notice if those are missing. There is also sometimes some strange lag (especially at startup), but overall VS2010 Beta 2 runs pretty good. It is a lot better than Beta1 and there are even a lot of areas which are faster than in VS2008 (e.g. the Add References dialog is now lighting fast, Rico Mariani - the performance god - worked on this ^^). But for us it seems we are less productive with VS2010 because our plugins we need most, do not work yet. It seems we have to wait till March 2010, when VS2010 is coming out, then CodeRush 10 will be available too.

VS2010 gives us a big plus with its new features and improvements and I really like working on Websites, Databases and dynamic language features, plus there is also that Parallelism thing (hello Task Parallel Library) that is getting more and more important every day. But the missing CR_Commenter and CodeRush (and some other minor addins and CodeRush plugins) give us minus two points, resulting in an overall worse situation. That's why we will stick with VS2008 for now. I will personally work on both VS2008 (older projects) and VS2010 (new stuff), but our team decided that we will keep our engine in VS2008 for now as we can just write and test code faster this way right now. And once I got more people convinced how cool the new dynamic language features are, they will get hooked too. Maybe by doing some useful tool. I also want to dig into MEF (Managed Extensibility Framework) sometime soon and maybe rewrite my good old CR_Commenter with all the feature requests I collected in the last years (without CodeRush this time, it just takes too long IMO to wait for them to get VS2010 ready).